Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“What about a garage, they’re gonna need a garage, too.”

“Okay, they got a garage.”

“Built-in.”

“Do you know that if this show lasts another three years I can make major before I’m thirty?”

“Say, Jimbo, isn’t it about time we organized another joint party with the Ninety-second Evac. I’ve got something I need a nurse to attend to.”

“And at least two cars, preferably Torinos or better.”

“Is it true the new CO’s father-in-law is an Agency station chief in Chile?”

“No, we’re no longer permitted to mention Hill Nine Seventy-six in the briefings anymore. It depresses the general.”

“All the major appliances and a color TV.”

“Buy me a drink, guys, I just extended for another six months.”

“There we were, four thousand feet on a deck of flak.”

“That’s okay, I always bet on Navy in the Army-Navy game, anyway.”

“Did you get a peep at that NVA love letter that came in the other day? ‘Though I move in the world’s dust, my heart lives in dreams of you.’ Pretty steamy, huh?”

“A good job, a private office, a secretary, and a briefcase, everybody gets a monogrammed briefcase.”

“The left engine was on fire all the way in to Quang Tri and the TOs bouncing up and down, shouting, ‘Jump, jump, you cock-sucker, we’re gonna die.’”

“So sorry, no more ice, sir.”

“No one’s ever really ruled out nukes, you know.”

“And suburbs, we’ll have to build suburbs for all the gooks to live in and gook schools, gook city halls, gook shopping centers with little gook consumer items.”

“I love my wife, I really do.”

Glasses clinked, matches flared.

“…and all the time you’re fucking her, see, she’s got this long silk scarf tied in tiny knots that she’s shoving up your ass and damn, if it don’t feel surprisingly fine.”

“I always wondered about you, Matt.”

“Well, at least my asshole opens, Frank.”

The officers gathered around the table exchanged knowing smiles. Through a process of bardic repetition and baroque embellishment the tale of Major Brand’s R&R had long ago evolved into accepted ritual. Just as much of the comfort of the church depends upon the familiarity of its liturgy, so was Brand’s performance enhanced by these good-natured interruptions. Raillery was as much a part of the program as the actual story line. The worst jokes would be tolerated, even welcomed, not simply because Major Brand outranked them and it was their duty to laugh, but because they honestly enjoyed these moments, this communion of belief in some sort of pleasure, no matter how brief or how obtained. Everyone leaned forward for the climax.

“And this little cunt, see, has got a fantastic sense of timing ’cause just when I’m about to shoot my rocks she whips that rag out and My God! my body busted open and shit, piss, farts, and come went flying in every direction all at the same time. And that, gentlemen, is how I got my cock banged in Bangkok.”

The round eyes of the unit emblem stared unblinking through laughter and applause. On the bar the plaster hips went up and down.

Behind the secured doors of the communications shack the stutter of teletypes was incessant day and night. The paper spilled out of the machines and rolled on the floor in long yellow tongues. Information. Incoming. Outgoing.

Back in a grove of picturesque palm and other nameless trees and broad-leafed plants, at the end of a neat gravel path lined with coconut shells painted white to resemble skulls or cue balls or ostrich eggs, distant in aura and architecture from the uniform mundanity of the rest of the compound, stood a shaggy brown bungalow, quiet, unobtrusive, a CO’s quarters perhaps or an enlisted men’s day room except for the electrified fence, the gates, the armed guards who answered no questions, turned away all visitors. The list of names of those permitted access was itself the privileged information of a rigorously investigated few. The building was draped in heavy folds of security, its covert projects partitioned into secret fragments. Upon secluded planning tables inside originated operations whose purposes the participants themselves were often unable to decode. For outsiders the only clues to the activity within were in unexpected glimpses of those strange figures arriving and departing day and night by helicopter onto the private pad in back or by field ambulance and canvas-covered jeep, strict military types of every branch and rank, scruffy dudes in nonregulation hair and handlebar moustaches, government civilians with and without gray frame glasses and chained briefcases, pot-bellied corporate tech reps from McDonnell Douglas and ITT; and all the Vietnamese in tailored tiger stripes, facial scars, and dead black eyes. Some you recognized, one or two you were allowed to know. People like Kraft. Or Conrad, “the man from Motorola,” who wore Hawaiian shirts, white jeans, canvas deck shoes, and never went anywhere without his Swedish Carl Gustav machine gun. All the flamboyance of the 1069th could be divided between the recon pilots and the “students” of Foreign Studies. The unit, in its boredom, turned toward these two groups for relief, a ride in the sky, an Eyes Only crumb from the bungalow. What was going on behind all that jungle gingerbread? Everyone had an idea. Something to do with shadows, shadows reconnaissance cameras at classified altitudes couldn’t photograph, a structure of shadows linking water to road, bush to market, shadows falling, shadows leading in, the shadows everywhere.

Foreign Studies Section, Major Benson Quimby commanding. The Spook House.

Twenty kilometers to the west everything was green and slippery and wet. The sergeant thought he was catching a cold, a stupid Vietnamese cold. He had to squeeze his nostrils to keep from sneezing. There was a stench and a mist that hung like gauze above the paddies. Water dripped from the vegetation above, clung to the vegetation below. When they entered the village the old men, the women, and the children stood quietly watching. Only a skinny brown dog looked them directly in the eyes but he did not bark.

“I don’t like it,” said the lieutenant.

“Let’s torch it,” said the sergeant.

Another sergeant named Kraft whispered something in the captain’s ear. He had dark skin and dark curly hair and no one had ever seen him before this patrol.

“Round up all the males,” ordered the captain.

The males totaled six: two old men with yellowish-white hair and broken teeth and four small boys, one missing his right arm. Kraft and the captain ambled over to this group, inspected them in silence.

Suddenly a shadow detached itself from the rear of a hut and sprinted into the light. A PFC with a flushed face and a green towel draped around his neck took a step forward, raising his rifle. “I’ll take him, sir.” Kraft brushed the weapon aside and ran off in pursuit. He caught up with the figure at the top of one of the muddy dikes surrounding the rice fields and both men toppled over into the water on the other side. The patrol heard splashes, blows, slaps, grunts, and then screaming in high-pitched Vietnamese answered by shouting in low-pitched Vietnamese and more splashes and silence. They saw Kraft climb out of the paddy, stumble for a moment in the pasty mud, they saw him walk slowly back, his uniform dark with moisture, his reddened nose leaking blood, the clay streaking his face. “Who is that guy?” muttered the PFC with the towel. “Press?” replied someone else. Everybody laughed.

Once a comical newspaper reporter had joined them for what he hoped would be a satisfactory period “waxing gooks.” The reporter bragged that already he had dispatched two commies to their Commissar, victims of the Sten gun he flaunted in spite of Geneva Convention suggestions concerning the behavior of journalists. Unfortunately, no gooks exhibited themselves for a waxing so on the way back in the reporter, ferocious with unleashed violence, leaped onto the back of a stray pig that had wandered into the road. Yelling that he was going to kill the beast with his bare hands, he hung there, feet dragging in the dirt, as the squealing animal zigzagged up and down until his grip weakened and he was tossed into a ditch and kicked in the forehead by a departing hoof. No one could stop laughing, all the way in, laughing. That was the famous laughing patrol. The reporter packed Sten gun and duffel bag and rode out on the first chopper.