Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“Do you have anything to drink?”

“I don’t drink. I can give you a hit off a joint.”

Converse declined.

“Did Owen ever mention Irvine Vibert?”

“Could be. I heard the name somewhere.”

Her pale foxy face displayed a shadow of weary amusement. “You look like you just figured out how and why.”

“I just figured out how.” June had taken a joint from her pack of cigarettes. She lit it with seeming absentmindedness. When she passed it to him, he took it and smoked.

“You never should have tried it, friend. Why did you?”

“In the absence of anything else,” Converse said.

The grass took him to Charmian. He had tried it in order to do something dangerous with her. The sex had been poorly because of his fear. When he spoke he could not make her listen; each time he had endeavored to engage her tripping Dixie fancy she had regarded him with such knowing calculation that he sometimes suspected she had the measure of his very soul. He had tried to extend, to surprise. As an act of communication.

“You mean you were broke?”

June had settled on the sofa with her legs tucked beneath her. Her head rested on the sofa back so that her torso was thrust forward and her breasts swelled under the halter. The rosy skin between the base of her breasts and her shorn armpit was firm and trim, without a wrinkle.

“No, I wasn’t broke.”

His belly warmed, his prick rose — it was beyond perversity. He sat desiring the girl — a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray.

What a feckless and disorderly person he was. How much at the mercy of events.

“It was just a kick,” he explained. He was communicating again.

And what events. What mercy.

He reached over and took another toke of the joint she was smoking.

“I can dig it. And oh boy, is that a bad way to be.”

She took the joint back gently.

“The way dealing is — scag for sure — you have to be ready to fuck people. You have to sort of like it. Some body goes down on you, does you — you walk on their face.” She set her feet back on the floor and leaned against the arm as though something had made her suddenly sad. “Owen used to say that if you haven’t fought for your life for something you want, you don’t know what life’s all about.”

“That must have been what I was after,” Converse said.

“Well, I hope you’re getting off.”

When she passed him the joint, he eased beside her and she did not move away. She was warm, firm, comfortable. He felt in need of comfort She observed his move without expression.

“You horny?”

“Just going with the flow,” he said.

“Shit, man. Don’t hurt your ear.”

She uttered a little grunt and giggled wearily.

“You see,” he communicated, “it’s like the oriental proverb. There’s a man hanging on the edge of a cliff. Above him there’s a tiger. Underneath there’s a raging river.”

June seemed to be looking at the ceiling.

“And on the side of the cliff,” she said, “there’s some honey. And the man licks it.”

“Owen do that one too?”

“Lemme tell you something,” she said. “I’ve listened to every manner of shit.”

He put his hands under her breasts and breathed into the dry coarse hair behind her ear. When he kissed her neck, she shifted to give him a wasted smile.

“You’re a funny little fucker.”

Converse was over five feet, ten and a half inches tall. He was at least three inches taller than June. No one had ever called him a funny little fucker before. The phrase rattled the shards of his vanity but it also found him out on a level he could not at first identify. He paused with his mouth against the terry cloth over her nipple, the strings of her halter between his fingers. He had been a funny little fucker in the Red Field.

He froze as he had then. He pressed against her as he had against the ground, stunned by the vividness of recall.

“We must read different manuals,” she said.

He sat up and stared at her. She laughed softly.

“Lose the flow?”

“I don’t know…” he began to say. He had wanted to take some comfort; he was tired of explanations.

“That was about as fucked up a come-on as I ever sat still for,” she told him.

“No offense.”

She shook her head amiably, tied her halter back on and looked at her watch.

“You don’t know your mind, that’s all. You don’t know what you want.”

“No,” Converse said.

As he left he thanked her for having Janey and for talking with him. She did not care to be thanked.

“If you ever see Ray — tell him it was Owen that called Antheil. Tell him it wasn’t me.”

Converse assured her that he would pass the message.

“Take care,” she told him as he stepped out into the corridor. “Take a whole lot.”

When his hand touched the elevator signal it touched off the tiniest spark of static electricity. He drew it back and clenched it.

When the elevator came, he got on.

The Red Field was in Cambodia, near a place called Krek. It had been about two o’clock in the afternoon in early May, the hottest time of year. Since dawn, Converse, a veteran wire-service man, and a young photographer had been on patrol with a Cambodian infantry company. The Khmers held hands as they advanced and sometimes picked flowers. They stopped often and when they did Converse would hunt out some shade and sit reading a paperback copy of Nicholas and Alexandra which he had bought in Long Binh PX.

The Cambodians were impossible troops, they clustered and chattered and tried each other’s helmets on. Walking in front of Converse was a little man called the Caporal who carried a Browning automatic rifle decorated with hibiscus. The white hot sun and the empty hours dulled all caution. It seemed that the very innocence of their passage could charm all menace.

When the silent jets streaked over the valley, they turned sweat-streaked faces toward the unbearable sky. They were surprised — but not alarmed. The aircraft were friendly. There was nothing else for them to be.

At the same moment in which they heard the engine roar the things began going off. MACV called them Selective Ordnance; it made them sound like assorted salad or Selected Shorts. They were Elephant Feet, the most dreaded, the most awful things in the world.

The Cambodians were still gawking skyward when bits of steel began to cut them up. Converse saw the wire-service man dive for the grass and did the same.

After the first detonations there was the sparest moment of silent astonishment. The screams were ground down by the second strike. Men rolled in the road calling on Buddha or wandered about weeping, holding themselves together as though embarrassed at their own destructibility — until the things or the concussions knocked them down.

A man was nailed Christlike to a tree beside the road, a shrine.

Converse lay clinging to earth and life, his mouth full of sweet grass. Around him the screams, the bombs, the whistling splinters swelled their sickening volume until they blot ted out sanity and light. It was then that he cried, although he had not realized it at the time.

In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.