Evan Hunter - Sons

And then we had a conversation that seemed to me representative of the precarious balance we were all trying to maintain between the simplicity we had known before the war and the sophistication rapidly engulfing us. With her hand curled around me, with her husband drunk and unconscious on the back seat of the automobile, Rosie Garrett casually asked, “How’s Nancy’s sister?”

“Still in bed,” I said, “but coming along.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Oh, just a bad cold is all. But she’s been running a fever.”

“She’s got how many children?”

“Two.”

“It’s terrible when the woman of the house comes down with something,” Rosie said.

“Especially when she’s married to someone like Ed.”

“What’s the matter with Ed?”

“Can’t stand anybody being sick. Gets absolutely furious, treats Clara like a dog just when she needs him most.”

“When’s Nancy coming back?”

“Wednesday, I think. Or Thursday. It depends on how Clara’s doing.”

“Will you come see me Monday night?”

“What?”

“Monday night. Allen’s staying late in Joliet.”

“I... don’t know, Rosie. Maybe we’d just better forget what happened.”

“No,” she said. “You’ll come see me.”

There were five rows of protective barbed wire around the base camp at Cu Chi, and the sandbagged bunkers were spaced at seventy-five-yard intervals inside the perimeter, with one man in each bunker during the daylight hours, and three at night. During the daytime, the line troops manned the perimeter. But between six p. m. and six a. m., two men from the rear echelon joined a single combat-experienced soldier in the bunker, and it was then that things got a little tense. Rear-echelon troops were inclined to shoot at anything that moved, and orders had come down from above that no one was to fire a weapon without permission from the sergeant or officer of the guard in the CP bunker, it being reasoned that the folks out there could be a returning friendly patrol as easily as some Vietcong infantrymen setting up a mortar. So whereas there were plenty of weapons in each bunker — M-60s and M-50s, grenade launchers, M-79s, Claymore mines, and of course our own pieces, the M-16s — we weren’t allowed to use them before we checked upstairs. It was a very comical war, all right.

The base camp at Cu Chi looked like a postage stamp from the air. Visualize those five rows of tangled barbed wire as the perforated edges of the stamp; and inside that the evenly spaced bunkers as the stamp’s border; and moving toward the center, the line-troop hootches with their wooden frames and screened upper halves and tented roofs as a second khaki-colored inner border; and then the body of the stamp itself, a geometric abstract with battalion headquarters to the southeast, and the mile-long air strip running perpendicularly off-center, and to the southwest the rear echelon hootches, a base within a base with its own mess hall and motor pool, its own orderly room and EM’s Club, its own showers and latrines and chapel — for those Remfs who had anything to pray about.

My own hootch was just inside the perimeter to the northwest, and it had a metal roof, which meant that it was very popular after dark, when all us guys would climb up onto it to watch the Night Show — the pyrotechnic display of the Hueys tiring tracer rounds, or of the mortars (ours and the V.C.’s) chewing up the countryside. Fresh back from the boonies, there was comfort in watching the action from a safe distance; it beat Batman all to hell. Some of the rear echelon hootches at Cu Chi were as sumptuously equipped as the Waldorf-Astoria, with electric fans, refrigerators, hot plates, lawn chairs, foot lockers (made by the gooks out of discarded tin cans, and sold at the PX) and even television sets. We were out in the boonies more than we were back at the base, however, and our hardback was only sparsely furnished. The only advantage this gave us over the Remfs was that our empty Spartan cells seemed infinitely larger than their crowded Playboy pads, even though they all measured about the same — thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. There were eight guys in my hootch, including Lloyd Parsons and myself.

Muhammed Ali, a man I enormously admired because he had announced to the world at large, “I don’t have no quarrel with them Vietcongs,” and then had been informed by the Illinois Boxing Commission that his spring title bout with Ernie Terrell was thereby canceled, later learning as well that he was persona non grata in such patriotic centers as Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Bangor, Maine, those guardian cities of America undoubtedly believing that a man who laid it on the line before millions of people each and every time he stepped into a ring was merely a downright yellow-bellied lily-livered coward for protesting his 1-A draft classification; Muhammed Ali, whom the press insisted on calling Cassius Clay despite his repeatedly slated preference for the Muslim name he had adopted; Muhammed Ali might have been surprised and pleased by the comfort in which we lived, exalted besides by the racial breakdown in our hootch, there being five white men and three Negroes present and accounted for, though I doubt he would have appreciated the democracy we experienced out in the boonies, where each of us, black or white, had a fair and equal opportunity of getting killed by them Vietcongs with whom, like Muhammed, many of us had no quarrel.

There were about twenty Chinooks and forty or fifty Hueys at Cu Chi and sometimes they coppered us to places that seemed a thousand miles away. The Air Force personnel at camp was limited to a dozen or so meteorologists, and so the fliers were Army pilots who would drop us in the middle of a clearing surrounded by jungle or rice paddy, and then go back to lay a short timer or two on a moldy mattress in a makeshift shack. Usually, though, we fanned out from the base in a radius no longer than twenty-five miles, going out on day-long patrols or ambushes, reconnaissance-in-force missions, and village sweeps that lasted for weeks and sometimes months, and then coming back to base for a day, or two, or four, and going out again. It was a very comical war, with no real front and with no place in Vietnam being positively secure against enemy action at any given time. Of the 190 guys in my company, I guess sixty per cent were smoking grass. In the hootch, the only one of us who wasn’t on pot was Lloyd Parsons, and maybe he had good and sufficient cause to avoid the stuff.

Lloyd was from 117th Street near Lenox Avenue, which he described as “New York’s fashionable Upper West Side, man.” He had begun smoking marijuana back in 1958, when it was still called Mary Jane, and before it was considered hip to bust a joint before dinner. He was twelve years old at the time, and a junior member in a bopping street gang called The Crusaders, which mounted regular armed forays into Spanish Harlem, a block and a half from its own turf. By 1959, The Crusaders ceased to function as an effective fighting unit, not because the Puerto Ricans had greatly depleted their forces, but merely because — of the gang’s fifteen charter members, and twelve members later recruited, and six junior members-in-training — only four of The Crusaders had not graduated from blowing tea to shooting heroin. (The Puerto Rican gangs were beginning to suffer from the effects of a similar escalation along about then, and so peace of a sort was achieved between the warring factors without benefit of intensive social work; nobody had time to go around breaking heads when he was trying to figure out where to get his next fix.) The gang broke up shortly thereafter, but not before Lloyd — at the age of fourteen — had become a confirmed junkie. He was busted for possession in the spring of 1962, while he was still a high school sophomore barely attending classes, and elected to be sent to Lexington for a commitment of at least four and a half months. He could not wait to get out of the hospital, and when he finally returned to his street in November, he immediately sought out his friendly neighborhood pusher and was back on the shit again within seventy-two hours. He stayed lucky until the beginning of 1964, when he was again picked up by the zealous detectives of the 28th Squad, and again sent to Kentucky. This time, because Lloyd had apparently learned something about himself in the intervening years, the cure was effective. He came back North in January of 1965, eighteen years old and determined never to go near narcotics again. His determination was strengthened by a little thing the United States had going over here in Southeast Asia. It seemed, Lloyd learned, that he could join the Army and enjoy an equality he had never known on the streets of Manhattan, while simultaneously being whisked away from daily contact with bad company eager to encourage and supply any new habit he might care to develop. He enlisted in February 1965, and made E-4 inside of a year. When I met him in Vietnam, he seemed very much his own man, confident that he would survive this war the way he had survived the war against the Puerto Ricans, certain there was a real future for him in the United States Army, where a man’s value was determined by the rating on his sleeve and not by the color of his skin. If anyone ever offered him a joint, Lloyd only shook his head politely, and said, “Thank you, no, I don’t smoke.” He was the coolest cat I’d ever met in my life. I think he considered me a friend.