Evan Hunter - Sons

In August, Dom Viscusi, a guy in our hootch, stepped on one of the V.C.’s punji sticks while we were on a vill sweep, the excrement-dipped, sharply-pointed bamboo piercing the sole of his boot and causing an infection that got him sent first to the 12th Evac Hospital on the base, and then to Japan for R and R, lucky bastard.

Rudy Webb was Dom’s replacement.

He arrived in September with about six or seven other guys who must have thought (the way I did when I first got there) that Cu Chi was really the boonies. I suppose it was, in relation to Saigon. But to us who had been there for a while, it was home, it was safe, and the boonies were out farther, the boonies were wherever they took us to fight. Rudy was an E-2, a short squat fellow with a weight lifter’s powerful build, crew-cut blond hair, and blue eyes slightly darker than my own. He came into the hootch somewhat shyly, the way most replacements did, and introduced himself to the other guys who were sitting around writing letters or listening to Armed Forces Radio on their transistors. He’d been flown over only last Tuesday, so we asked him the usual questions about the States and about the Saigon scene, and he answered us like fuzz being interviewed on a television news program, never once saying anything as simple as “We caught the crook” when it was possible to say, “We apprehended the perpetrator,” peppering his speech with words he surely understood, but making them sound like a second language. I guess he was trying very hard to create a good first impression among guys who had been living together for quite some time. But not knowing our separate backgrounds, and not wanting to take any chances, he came on like what I suspect he thought a college professor sounded like, and the results were a little ludicrous. Nonetheless, he seemed to be a nice enough guy, and I think all of us considered him a welcome addition to the hootch. Dom Viscusi had, in fact, been a terrible pain in the ass.

I did not get a chance to really talk to Rudy until evening chow, I was sitting alone at one of the mess hall tables when he came over and quietly asked, “Excuse me, is this seat occupied?”

“No,” I said.

“You mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.”

“Thank you,” he said, and climbed over the bench. He was wearing his newly issued cotton jungle shirt and field pants, and he moved with the ponderous neatness of most very strong men, moving his muscles about like heavy furniture in a small room, adjusting his buttocks to the bench and his arms to the table. He ate as though he had come from a large family where it was imperative to finish everything in sight before somebody grabbed it off your plate. He did not look up at me again until he had devoured all the food on his tray, and then he raised his head and his eyes and abruptly said, “I’m not sure I caught your name this afternoon. I’m Rudy Webb.”

“Wat Tyler,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, Wat,” he said, grinning boyishly and engagingly, and then suddenly looked at me with a puzzled expression, and asked, “How was that again? Wat?”

“That’s right. Well, Walter, really.”

“Oh, Walter

“But everyone calls me Wat.”

“Yeah?” he said, and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “regardless,” and extended his hand across the table, slyly watching me to see if I’d caught his proper usage, no dolt mouthing nonexistent words was he, “it’s a real pleasure,” and took my hand in a firm grip, a good grip, not the kind some jocks gave you when they were trying to assert something by crushing your fingers to a pulp. “Where are you from, Wat?” he said, like a genial master of ceremonies on a television game show, trying to put a nervous guest at ease.

“Connecticut.”

“That’s very nice up there in Connecticut,” he said. “Whereabouts exactly?”

“Talmadge.”

“I don’t believe I know it. That anywhere near New Haven?”

“About halfway between New Haven and New York.”

“I’m from Newark,” he said. “New Jersey.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I got people in New Haven. Relatives.”

“I went to school there,” I said.

“Yeah? What school?”

“Yale.”

“Oh, yeah? The college there?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened? You flunk out?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I quit.”

“How come?”

“Just like that,” I said, and shrugged.

“Didn’t you like it?”

“I liked it fine.”

“Then why’d you quit?”

“It was a personal matter.”

“You knock up a girl or something?”

“No,” I said, and suddenly burst out laughing.

“If you did, who cares? This is Vietnam, we’re lucky we get out of here without having our asses cracked,” he said and, pleased by my spontaneous laughter, began laughing with me.

The red silk pajamas came as a surprise that night to everyone in the hootch. But it was Jimmy Wyatt, a black kid from Philadelphia, who started giggling when he saw them. Depending on what season it was, we slept either in our underwear or all our clothes, not because civilian pajamas were outlawed (they weren’t), and not because we were worried about additional laundry charges (most of us sent our laundry out to be done, the way American sailors on Chinese gunboats did in the early 1900s, preferring the native work to the slob jobs done by the PX or QM concessions), and not because we thought it might be necessary to pull on our pants in a hurry (we were all fairly confident that Charlie would never get through the perimeter), but merely because you didn’t wear pajamas in the goddamn Army. I had never seen a soldier wearing pajamas, not at Fort Gordon where I’d taken my Basic, and not at Fort Jackson where I’d had my AIT, and certainly not here in Vietnam. But Rudy Webb readied into his duffle that first night, and pulled out a pair of blazing red silk pajamas we later learned he had bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a big yellow dragon embroidered on the back, and without a sign of embarrassment or a word of introduction, put them on and then picked up his toilet kit and started heading out of the hootch toward the latrine. Jimmy Wyatt, who was tall and skinny and who had played center for his high school’s basketball team, was stretched out on his cot reading a comic. It got very cold at night in September, even when it wasn’t raining, and so Jimmy was fully dressed except for his boots, and he had wrapped his legs in a blanket besides, and he seemed very cozy and happy and thoroughly engrossed in his reading. His short-timer’s calendar hung on the wall behind him, the gatefold from last month’s Playboy, over which he had drawn a grid of tiny squares covering the girl’s body and representing the number of days to the end of his tour. Each time we got back from the boonies, Jimmy filled in more of the squares with his pencil. He had forty-two days to go, and the only open squares were on the girl’s huge breasts and belly. He turned a page in the comic as Rudy walked past, and I suppose the dazzling display of red silk caught his eye because he looked up and suddenly began giggling. Rudy stopped dead in his tracks, as though he had been anticipating some comment on his sleeping attire, and was now more than ready to deal with it. There was a smile on his face as he turned to Jimmy. I was writing a letter to Dana at the other end of the hootch, and when I looked up the first thing I saw was Rudy’s smile, and I remember thinking what an odd smile it was, and then he said, “What’s the matter, pal?”

“Man, those are some classy pajamas,” Jimmy said, giggling in his very high, almost girlish way.

“You like them, huh?” Rudy said, still smiling.