Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“Another turn of the screw.”

“Another poor individual with Swiss cheese for a historical consciousness. I think someone should take him aside for a quick briefing on the particulars of the colonel’s short unhappy reign.”

“There’s movement in that direction and speaking of which I see by my waterproof shock-resistant, macho man wrist watch that I’m gonna be late for my next class, Botany 101.”

“Here, take this,” urged Mueller, pulling a thick book out of one of the several huge piles strewn about the floor. “Check out pages ninety-two to a hundred and ten when you get a chance. As a favor to me.”

“ The Bamboo Maiden ?”

“Memoirs of a former French infantry officer. He spent two years in a mental hospital in Dijon.”

“Wonderful.”

An hour later Griffin stood on a metal flight ramp in the shadow of a wing, staring up at the plumbing attached to the underside of a twin-engined C-123.

“We’ve got the boom there with fourteen nozzles on each wing plus the eight on the tail,” explained the pilot, gesturing with a dead cigar butt. He wore a zippered gray flight suit and a .38 revolver in a shoulder holster beneath his left armpit. When he stepped in front of him, Griffin smelled whiskey and Old Spice. “The tank holds a thousand gallons and at air speed we’re laying down about three gallons per acre. Average coverage three hundred acres, elapsed mission time five minutes. Of course, in an emergency we can dump the whole thousand gallons in thirty seconds.”

Griffin studied the scattering of holes across the plane’s belly, the crazy-quilt pattern of dark and light squares, the result of replacement and repair, and the fine coating of some oil-like substance so complete it appeared the plane had been totally immersed in a bath of preservative and then set down here before them to dry, dripping excess from every point and edge. The liquid smelled like kerosene. Carefully painted along the nose were the words WE EAT FORESTS. Under the cockpit window On the pilot’s side were drawn several rows of small green trees with bright red ×s centered through each one.

“How safe is this stuff?” Griffin asked.

Without a word or hesitation the pilot squatted down, dipped his finger into one of the puddles growing on the ramp beneath the wing nozzles, and stuck it into his mouth. Incredulous, Griffin swung around to look behind him. About twenty-five feet away Weird Wendell, camera for a face, held up an arm, thumb and forefinger forming an O.

“Is he intelligence too?” asked the pilot.

“The very embodiment,” Griffin replied. Both he and Payne had removed the rank insignia from their lapels before driving over to the Six-oh-third air force squadron, the 4-H Club as the crews preferred to call themselves. The pilot had no way of knowing he wasn’t addressing equals.

“Wanted me to go that route once. Turned it down flat. Dead-end work. You know they did one of those psychological studies a couple years back analyzing all the military jobs and know what they found? You guys and the cooks are just about tied for the highest percentage of alcoholics in any job category. No feedback. Too much frustration. You put out and you put out and get nothing back. Like fucking a dead whore. Let me take you boys up and I’ll show you results, a couple roads we cleaned last month and a manioc field up in the mountains VC were using for food. Ever see a load going down? A fucking blizzard. Beautiful sight. Come on out in the morning. Be glad to have you.”

Griffin looked at the holes again. “No, thanks, afraid my colleague and I will be locked up all day in one of those marathon strategy sessions.”

“Too bad. Tomorrow we’re going after mangrove.”

“Maybe another time.”

“It’s different out there, you know. Can’t really taste the full flavor without air time. Helicopters don’t fly any lower than we do, puts an interesting perspective on things, it’s a glorious sight out there, I tell you, absolutely glorious.”

“I know,” Griffin said. “I see the film.”

His field trip completed, Griffin spent the remainder of his duty day in classroom work under the tutelage of Specialist Fifth Class Ronald Winehaven, master of applied science. Lessons in the detection and measurement of organic death. The physics of infrared, the chemistry of poisons.

“The first time I heard of Agent Orange,” Griffin confessed, “I saw a piece of fruit wrapped in a trenchcoat.”

“Try an ester cocktail,” explained Winehaven, “a jigger of 2, 4-D to a jigger of 2,4,5-T.”

“Yum,” said Griffin.

“It’s usually diluted with diesel fuel to get a better spray effect. Stuff sticks to the leaves, absorbs right through even waxy skin. And here’s the fun part: it mimics plant hormones so once inside it starts to heat up the plant’s economy, everything commences to grow and grow until the plant grows itself to death. Sort of a botanical inflation.”

“Or vegetable cancer.”

“The morbidity period varies according to species. Some shrivel up in a week or so, others linger on for months. We’ve found that good visibility often requires two applications.”

“You like this work?”

“Haven’t cracked a rifle since my last qualifying round at Fort Dix.”

Griffin learned about need: that peeling away sections of the enemy’s green umbrella exposed his activity to the light of return fire, that crop denial disrupted his activity, that without food or a place to hide he could not win.

“At least that’s the story,” Winehaven concluded. “I guess it’s better than carpet bombing.”

Appraising the carpet had been Griffin’s specialty until now. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose.”

“Of course it’s not as if bushes were innocent. Ever been out on the perimeter?”

“No, not yet, thank God.”

“Well, you ought to go out there sometime, sit on top of a bunker, stare at the tree line for a while. You have to concentrate because if you blink or look away for even a moment you might miss it, they aren’t dumb despite what you may think, they’re clever enough to take only an inch or two at a time. The movement is slow but inexorable, irresistible, maybe finally unstoppable. A serious matter.”

“What movement, what are you talking about?”

“The trees of course, the fucking shrubs. And one day we’ll look up and there they’ll be, branches reaching in, jamming our M-6os, curling around our waists.”

“Like Birnam Wood, huh?”

“Actually, I was thinking more of triffids.”

That night, lying in the dark of his room, head throbbing like the ancient engine of a tramp steamer laboring upriver, Griffin reviewed his work since his arrival for duty in RVN. First the bomb damage assessments, now these defoliation studies. He’d seen the land develop acne, now he’d watch it lose its hair. Sooner or later, he realized, it was only a question of time, they’d have him on his hands and knees, polishing the skull, measuring the brain pan with a pair of steel calipers.

Dear Mom and Pop,

Everything fine here. Nothing much to report since my last letter. The war drags on, the food grows worse. We have a sadistic mess sergeant who serves us a stew about every other day that no one has yet had the courage to ask what the lumps are. You might want to send me some canned meat and fruit and some cheese if you get a chance.

Glad to hear Dad is now Republican county chairman. See what you can do to help support us over here. We need all the encouragement we can get.

Please do not worry. I am as safe as anyone can be in this country. I’ll bet the Ambassador has taken more fire. In the last rocket attack the hootch next to mine was wiped out by a direct hit and all the pieces of shrapnel could do was cut open a few of the sandbags around the bunker I was in. So don’t worry. I’m healthy, as happy as you could be in this environment and I’ll see you all in 264.