Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Ingersoll rounded the corner of the chain-link fence enclosing the II Section. “It’s stuck,” he shouted hysterically, “I can’t get it out!” He ran toward Griffin, tugging on the pin of a hand grenade. “It’s stuck or corroded or…” The pin snapped, Ingersoll stumbled, the grenade tumbled gaily along the ground. “Get down!” shouted Griffin, dropping onto his chest. Arms outstretched before him, Ingersoll ran mindlessly on, hoping apparently to find his lost toy and heave it away before anyone got hurt. The underside of Griffin’s eyelids glowed red for an instant, a hot iron pressed the wrinkles out of the back of his field jacket. When he dared to raise his head, he saw a log in the center of a bonfire. “My God,” exclaimed a voice, “was that a gook?” A helicopter stuttered overhead, its bright searchlight swinging wildly back and forth. “They’re coming in!” someone screamed in the escalating decibels of a cinema heroine. “They’re coming in!”

Sergeant Mars dismissed the security guards and assumed responsibility for the situation in the interrogation building. The detainees began wailing the moment he stepped through the door. He used a sixteen on automatic and it only took two clips to complete one row. It was easier than mowing grass. He was reloading to do the other side when Lieutenant Phan rushed in, armed and breathless. “Sergeant!” he cried. “What you do?” Mars shot him in the face. Most of the remaining detainees were blubbering by now, crying, begging with hands thrust between the bars, some huddled in back against the far wall trying to put as much space as they could between their helpless bodies and the iron mouth of his white man’s gun, some stood in place, their backs turned. Old Uncle Fish, who hadn’t uttered a sound through the water and the bamboo and the long distance calls, sat stoically on crossed legs in the center of his cage. Mars began with him. A wave of teletypelike thunder broke down the length of the long room, crashing over the screams, and sweeping away into a sea of silence. Then Mars rolled a fragmentation grenade down the center aisle and bolted for cover. The prisoners’ interrogation was now officially concluded.

Wendell zoomed in on the fire, slowly circling backward around the remains of Ingersoll. In the viewfinder flesh fell away from the dripping bone. Denied high psychological drama, all that was left was cheap close-ups.

In the II office Griffin found a trio of confused and frightened strangers. One was squatting under Captain Patch’s desk, one was shredding documents by hand, one was fiddling with the dials of a safe. “These won’t open,” he complained in a hoarse plaintive whisper. He looked at Griffin’s face. “My God, you’re wounded.” Griffin shoved him aside and quickly moved down the row of steel filing cabinets, unlocking one drawer after another. He watched his hands opening and closing, attending to their tasks as though they were the bulky gloves of a spacesuit. He picked up a dusty thermite grenade from the cardboard box on top of the safe. “Where’d Ingersoll get that phosphorus?” His voice too seemed to be transistorized, crackling over headphones. Nobody knew. “If we had been properly trained…” muttered one. “Go on out to the bunkers,” said Griffin. “I’ll handle this.” He was inside his helmet, protected from the alien atmosphere. He began with the drawers containing the herbicide reports. He placed a grenade in each one, then slammed the drawers shut. In a few minutes there’d be no record of the work he’d done in this war, he’d be ready to die. The outer door opened, Griffin swung his rifle around. Captain Patch dashed into the room, waving a pistol, shouting incoherently, wide eyes rolling around like those of a horse trapped in a barn fire. The left side of his face was slashed open, his shirt was bloody to the waist. “Fresh weight,” he seemed to be crying, “fresh weight.” “It’s okay, sir,” said Griffin, “I took care of it.” His finger tightened around the trigger. If this man didn’t get out of here in about one minute… Patch grabbed a manila folder on his desk and ran from the room. Griffin stood in the center of the office, home for almost a year, atop the intelligence insignia on the floor, and waited for the secrets to melt. The safes were glowing like furnaces. Then he remembered. Copies had been telexed to MACV, CINCPAC, JCS; evidence was strewn like a highway crash all over the globe. He’d never be free of this mess, even in death. A bullet tore through the wall, hit the back of Captain Patch’s chair and sent it spinning around and around. Griffin ran out the red door.

On the opposite side of the runway all the hangars of the 101st Airborne were burning merrily, a row of lighted hearths collapsing into ash. A flaming plane drifted across the flight ramp into a line of parked helicopters. Huge metal blades spun like windmills through the billowing explosions.

Brief domes of white-and-orange light swelled upward from the perimeter as drums of foo gas were detonated. Now there were wide holes in the wire big enough for the whole night to slip through.

The Reactionary Force had finally been assembled into trucks and under the leadership of Sergeant Sherbert driven out to plug the dike. The ambush caught them completely by surprise. Dead reinforcements sprawled bleeding among the sand dunes.

Shadows sped swiftly inward.

Anstin’s privates recorded the names of those breaking down in their group.

Hidden under a musty piece of canvas, Vegetable lay on the floor of the guard tower, head exposed to the nose over the edge of the platform, peering from this choice balcony seat into the spectacle below. Somewhere between his last guard shift and the attack he had mislaid his rifle so all he could do now anyway was watch. He seemed to be so high the action down there was unreal, kitchen match fires, plastic toy soldiers. When the photo lab blew up, he saw a little man pop into the sky and separate into little pieces that fell flaming back to the ground. That was the best so far. He had seen the motor pool inferno, the mess hall eruption, the hangar collapse, the planes bursting like overdone potatoes, and soon it all looked the same, fire and smoke and noise everywhere he turned. What a time they were going to have smoking and joking and talking about this night. Privileged with such a good view, he was trying hard to collect interesting impressions. Now he noticed something. There were naked men creeping in between the hootches. A naked man carrying an AWOL bag sneaked up to a bunker and tossed the bag inside. There was a flash, a muffled boom, sandbags bouncing and falling. There were naked men everywhere. Two were crawling right below the tower toward that bunker. Trips’s bunker, Wendell’s bunker, his bunker. On the ground the NVA sapper team heard a savage cry and looked up in astonishment at the man plunging toward them, arms outstretched, a length of canvas fluttering up behind him like a cape. One short burst of automatic weapons fire was more than adequate to blow off Batman’s head.

Staff sergeants Anstin and Perkle were pinned down in a gulley behind the officers’ latrine.

“Can you see him?” asked Perkle.

Anstin lifted his head. Bullets spattered sand into his face. “Motherfucking Christ,” he hissed. “You hear that, cocksucker’s shooting at us with one of our own weapons.”

“How many you think there are?”

“I’ll bet you a bottle of Regal that’s Joe the barber. Remember that pacing all the time, goddamn gook was measuring targets. Now he’s come in for final shaves on his favorites. Fucking prick. Never did trust him, razor and fish breath.”

“Think you can reach him with the grenade?”

“Damn well try.” Anstin moved up into a crouch, cocked his arm, and heaved. The grenade fell short.