Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

What was he rattling on about? The colonel was part joke, part sinister mystery. Sometimes he sounded like a cracker, other times like a Kennedy. He liked to have the Screwy Loot drive him around the mountain in a jeep while he chewed cigars and sipped from a pint of whiskey, clutching an M16 between his knees, hoping to shoot at tigers or leopards or wild pigs.

“Now, this Notre Dame-Michigan State game I’m telling you about is already being called the Game of the Century. It’s important to me not just as a former tackle for the Fighting Irish, but as an enemy of the Vietcong right here and now. I’ve been trying to get hold of the films of this game. I’d like every soldier in this theater to study what happened. I hope I can get some film of the train ride our Fighting Irish took to the Spartan Stadium in East Lansing, Michigan. People standing in the cornfields and dairy farms beside the train rails holding up signs saying ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, Notre Dame’s in second place.’ I’d like to show every one of you what the Irish saw, heading into a stadium full of seventy-six thousand people chanting and rocking and swaying and hollering. I wish we could all sit down together and watch the kickoff.

“The Irish played under a cloud of misfortune. Our main pass receiver—Nick Eddy—slipped on the ice getting off the train and wrecked his shoulder before the game even started. Next setback, after the first play of the game our best center left the field on a stretcher. Then our quarterback Terry Hanratty went down in a pile and he was dragged off with a separated shoulder. Well into the second quarter, Michigan State was tromping us ten to nothing. But this young diabetic second-string quarterback name of Coley O’Brien somehow tossed a thirty-four-yard touchdown pass to a second-string receiver named Bob Gladieux—not even an Irish name —and then the Irish held Michigan State off until our kicker made a field goal right at the start of the fourth quarter.

“And there you are, a tie game, ten to ten. One minute thirty seconds left. Irish have the ball on our own thirty-yard line. There’s the field. There’s the goal. Here are the men.

“But the head coach, Coach Parseghian, elected to run the clock out and take the tie. Elected to leave the field without a victory.

“Now, why was that?

“It was because taking the tie didn’t diminish their chances of winning a national championship. A tie still left them in first place, nationally. And a couple weeks later they did, in fact, take the national championship. They trounced USC fifty-one to zero.

“Now, do you think I’m going to tell you that was wise? Well, maybe it was. Maybe it was wise. But it was wrong. “Because that day in East Lansing, against their bitterest foe, they left the field without a victory.” The sweat poured out of his silver flattop down his face, but he didn’t wipe it away. He removed his hands from his hips and slapped his right

fist into his left palm, a fist as broad across the knuckles as any heavyweight champion’s. “By God,” the colonel said, “I’m going to get the film of this game. We’re going to sit down and watch it together right here in this camp.

“Now, listen to me. I don’t want you to get confused why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you this because it’s exactly what we ourselves, right here, are always up against, invariably. Invariably we are up against a stretch of ground and an enemy. And to give up the stretch of ground in pursuit of some theory about the future is not the way we do things here. Now, your mission is to keep this hill secure for our LZ up there, and to check out tunnel entrances and mark them on the map. You do not have to go down inside those tunnels. We have people for that job.”

Indeed, there were people for that job: the badass Kootchy Kooties. These guys slithered down face-first into dark holes in the earth with a pistol in one hand and their balls in the other and a flashlight in their teeth, anywhere in the Cu Chi region. “Kootchy Kooties” was a fabulous name. As for Echo Recon, they didn’t have a flashy call-name, but owing to their proximity to Cao Phuc they couldn’t avoid being known as the Cowfuckers, a stupid bit of luck. They didn’t even get to paint it on anything because it was dirty language.

“We will win this war.” Was he still talking? “And the efforts of this particular platoon will be instrumental in that. Think of us as infiltrators. This land under our feet is where the Vietcong locate their national heart. This land is their myth. We penetrate this land, we penetrate their heart, their myth, their soul. That’s real infiltration. And that’s our mission: penetrating the myth of the land.

“Questions?”

There came a long pause during which they listened to the birds down here and the whack-whack-whack of a helicopter up on the mountain.

The colonel removed his sunglasses and succeeded in staring the whole platoon in the eye at once. “Here’s what we said about tie games when I played for the Irish: we said a tie game is like kissing your sister. I didn’t come out to Southeast Asia in 1941 to kiss my sister. I came to Southeast Asia to fly missions with the Flying Tigers against the Japanese, and I stayed in Southeast Asia to fight the Communists, and I now tell you something, men, with all the solemnity of the deepest kind of

promise: when I die, I will die in Southeast Asia, and I will die fighting.” He looked to the Screwy Loot, and the Screwy Loot said, “Dismissed!”

They moved to their respective duties. Screwy and Sarge and the Kootchy Kooties congregated over by Bunker One with the colonel. In general the platoon resented this civilian, but they were youngsters, after all, and they acknowledged his experience and had a vague superstition that he brought a blessing on them, for there were some—like Flatt and Jollet, at the moment MIA but probably just AWOL—who’d done a whole tour and upped for seconds and had still never once taken enemy fire.

Around eleven hundred hours—fifteen hours late—they heard the M35 pulling in: Flatt and Jollet bringing three replacements, one short, one medium, one tall.

Sarge was standing there to greet them, Staff Sergeant Harmon, a sunburned man with his sleeves turned up to his biceps, his leggings tucked meticulously, his blond, almost white hair neatly trimmed. He appeared never to sweat. “I consider you to be just coming back from AWOL with a government-property vehicle.”

“No no no no no no no no,” Flatt said, “no, Sarge, it ain’t like that at

all. These guys can explain.” “You two’s the ones going to explain,” Sergeant Harmon said. “Whatever you say, Sarge.” “You men stow yourselves in Number Four,” Harmon told the re

placements, and took Flatt and Jollet into Bunker One.

As soon as they’d gone from sight, Private Getty, who was as usual very upset about something, slapped his helmet down on the wet ground outside the showers and sat on it with his feet apart and his knees together like a little girl, holding his sidearm in his lap.

Somebody yelled, “SARGE …” Getty raised his weapon overhead so they could all see it and promised to kill the first motherfucker who got within six feet of him. Sergeant Harmon came back out to find the three replacements

watching Private Getty undistractedly. “Steer off that man,” the sergeant said. The tallest one was upset, almost tearful. “We don’t even know that

guy. We just got here.”

Getty shouted, “I just want everybody to realize!” The sarge turned on Flatt and Jollet, now squatting by the door of

Bunker One. “Ease up on him some.” “Aaah-” “He was fine till you turned up just now. Quit riding on him.” “Listen, Sarge.” “You already made me say it twice. Fm done telling you.” “Yes, Sarge.” “No response required. Fm gon’ watch how you do.” The sarge was one of those casually shining, exemplary guys, tall,