Don't Cry For the Brave Page 2

I was silent. This was something I’d never considered in my impetuous behaviour. The thought of being sent home in disgrace, being identified in the town as a veteran who couldn’t cut it. However tough the battle, however unreasonable the stress, there was an unwritten and unspoken rule that the troops carried the burden, dying of injuries, maimed, going mad, but they didn’t quit. No quitting. OK, a few shat themselves and ran away, but relatively very few. And that unwritten and unspoken rule was accepted as gospel in every town in every state at home.

  I helped myself to another gulp of whiskey to allow thinking time.

  “Maybe you don’t care about the consequences.” Amherst spoke dispassionately, and watched me carefully.

  “I care, but I haven’t much confidence in a stage-managed defence.” I thought of a film with Amherst as director, the kind of slick trial presentation you see in the movies.

  Amherst’s lips twisted like a father dealing with an obtuse child. “Bob, all defences are stage-managed. On the question of your confidence in me, I don’t mind whether you have it or not. You’re not paying me. But you better understand the process you are going to suffer or you’ll be minced up like sausage meat. And when you understand the process, your basic intelligence will tell you, you have to respond.”

  “Jawing about this in court is going to make it worse.”

  “Listen, you’re the turkey, I’m the cook.”

  “I thought I was going to be a sausage?”

  “Good,” Amherst smiled. “A lot of small things go in your favour. The Court will be reluctant to convict an officer. If they can decently let you off, they will. They’re not a hanging jury out to get you. All they need is a plausible reason… ”

  “Refusing to obey your CO when Charlie’s outside the wire is difficult to put plausibly.”

  “Leave that to me. The Army doesn’t want this trial. We’re supposed to be fighting a war, not playing judges and lawyers. You’ll get the benefit of haste. They won’t take much convincing that what happened to you should have been handled by your CO as a little domestic problem. They won’t thank him for pushing his problems upward.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “No. The charges are serious. Very serious. But on what I know at the moment the facts aren’t. We may be able to make the charges look like technicalities, but it won’t be easy. I’ll need to know everything you know about what happened. And I mean everything.”

  I had a fair idea of what Amherst was thinking: how to control the emotions and prejudices which can blow like storm winds around a case; uncertainty whether I was ill, or a hardhead, or a coward playing to be sent home, or possibly a good guy in a bad scene, now wanting, for shame, to get it behind him as quickly as possible. I was too confused to work out which of these assessments was the real me.

  “No harm in telling you about it,” I said.

  Amherst passed the bottle. “Where y’ from?”

  “Son of a trucker, born Rochester, New York State twenty-five years ago. Grew up and schooled in Saratoga Springs. Graduated from Rochester City College, a major in English and history, thinking of teaching. Volunteered to get an edge rather than be drafted. At City we didn’t understand what was happening. We had ROTC guys beating war drums and peaceniks painting Fuck Johnson on the walls of the campus dorms. I wouldn’t have recognised the chicken track sign if it had been tattooed on my ass.”

  Amherst agreed. “Same here. No perspective. How can you get perspective at college when you’re thinking of baseball and screwing?”

  “How did you get here?” I asked the question because I still wasn’t confident about this guy in whose hands my future might rest. Although I was too confused to work out my own direction of travel from here, I was worried about having my fate complicated by an incompetent.

  “My folks are hardworking farmers in North Dakota, and my mom indoctrinated me from an early age that I had to be a doctor or a lawyer, and in default anything but a farmer. Some smartass law grads were working on ways to dodge the draft, but my folks expected me to serve. Joined the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, figuring I’d get trial experience and stay out of the firing line.” He made a nervous sweep with his hand over his scalp.

  “The soft option.”

  “Frankly, yeah.”

  I liked him for admitting it. With hindsight, I’d have taken the soft option too if there’d been one. “Where are you going to bestow your trial experience when we win this war?”

  “I fancy a small-town general practice in the Mid-West somewhere. Court work yes, but a mixed bag: property, probate. Comfortable and quiet. You?”

  “As I said, teaching, but who knows, now? Been in ‘Nam two years. Second tour. Firefights on long-range patrols. Several offensives. A bit of shrapnel scratched my butt but otherwise nothing.”

  “You’ve been lucky.” Amherst nodded respectfully. He could see what I already recognised: the span from ROTC rookie, athletic and decisive, to the vet, hesitant, vacillating, clouded by depression. “It takes a toll.”

  “Do you think the prosecutor might think I’m looking for a way out of the Army?”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t think so. Not even subconsciously. I’m like everybody else, I guess. This is one fuck-up of a war, but I have to play a reluctant part until we get it done.”

  Amherst considered. “I don’t know. The prosecutor might suggest you’re a devious man looking for a way out. It’s happening every day.”

  “Who is he, the prosecutor?”

  “Max Vale. Lieutenant Colonel Max Vale. Courts are often swayed by impressions as much as facts, but Max is a man for facts, for detail, not exactly a pedant… but nearly.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Amherst shook his head in a private reverie, apparently reserved in what he could say to a client about his professional brother. “He grinds cases up small.”

  “Sausage meat?”

  “Max is a career Army man.”

  I was now stretched out on the bed in a T-shirt and shorts, hands clasped behind my head, a cigarette jammed between my teeth. A blue tendril of smoke cottoned up to the ceiling. “You scared of him?”

  “Hell, no. He’s a goddamned nuisance. He won’t let you go easily, that’s all. That’s why he’s a good prosecutor.”

  Amherst took a legal notepad and pencil from his briefcase and sat back in the easy chair, his pencil poised, his head slightly askew like a conductor waiting to hear the first note from the orchestra.

  “Where to start?” I asked.

  “Wherever you want. In Saratoga Springs if you like.”

  “Maybe the starting point is the Springs because that’s where I went to school, and Gail was there, but we were never friends. And I observed her brother Jim Blake in the distance. Gail’s my fiancée. She’s a nurse right here, now, in ‘Gon. Jim is a company commander in my unit. Jim and Gail are close. He’s Westpoint. A career man. One of the very brightest track athletes and students at Saratoga High in my day. I’m not in the same league as Jim. As I say, we weren’t buddies. He was a star. I was a distant admirer. I asked to join this unit because I knew one or two other guys from the Springs who were serving. I figured you might as well fight alongside those you know, but actually you don’t get to be beside them. I didn’t realise, at that time, that I’d become involved with Gail, or meet Jim Blake so close and personal. So there’s a starting point… ”

  2

  The officers were three or four deep around the bar of the US Forces Officers’ Club in Le Loi Boulevard every night to take on fuel for their journey into the small hours. The bar room was chilled by air conditioners, decorated in black and chrome, thick with cigarette and joint smoke, and deafeningly noisy; the noise of urgent, even frantic voices, which at times masked the canned jazz music.

  I was newly arrived – three months – and temporarily assigned. I had a shot of rye in my hand and guys from 21st Division HQ, where I was pushing paper, around me. Life in ‘Gon was bearab
le; days spent in cool rooms and clean clothes, poring over plans and reports. Off duty I didn’t think too much about the war. I endured the poignancy of Christmas 1966 in a sultry city, hazed with vehicle fumes, its streets occupied by tanks like malevolent beetles. There were bars and women and drugs and enough leisure at night to take advantage of them. I partied desperately in my weeks with the 21st as the date of my posting to C Company of the 33rd Regiment came closer. For a time, there was a possibility that I would be appointed to a desk job in Hoi An as an intelligence officer; but no, for once the Army was going to give a serviceman what he had perhaps foolishly asked for: a frontline regiment.

  I was looking across the circular bar which centred the room, at one of the relatively few women officers. I thought she was striking in a pallid way; auburn hair almost shoulder length, a wide brow, glowing eyes. As I went on drinking with my buddies, occasionally joining in the aimless talk, my mind worked on the picture of the girl who was a Nursing Corps captain. I placed myself on the far side of my group to remain sociable but get a clear view through the talking heads. I was almost certain that she was Gail Blake from Saratoga High.

  I had never dated her, never danced with her, never been to a party where she was, and as far as I could remember, only taken a few classes which she shared. I couldn’t recall any precise meeting or conversation, but I had probably said some inconsequential words to her at classes. But I had noticed her at school, learned her name and connected her with her brother, Jim Blake, a sure Phi Beta Kappa three years ahead of us.

  And I had thought about her at school, as guys do about girls, not in her case about possessing her body, but about her being the kind of girl I’d like to date, without ever seriously considering it could become a reality. She was slim and unsexy then, with angelic looks, a wise, oval face and purplish eyes. My daydreams were more about winning a track event or scoring a home run in her presence, not that I was ever remotely likely to do these things in reality.

  In other respects too, the Gail Blake I experienced had been part of a different life. My old man had been a trucker hauling transcontinental rigs who had never been to high school. We were a family of four with my kid brother, our income limited by my father’s chronically painful back. There were no books in our home and not much understanding of the value of an education. We had a small house in the Overton area where the men who built the town years ago used to live in cabins. It took Saratoga High to lift my sights to a different kind of life, that which a girl like Gail Blake accepted as normal.

  The Blakes, the little I knew of them – learned from talk at school – weren’t big-shots; they were the kind of family whose parents were in insurance or accountancy or something else you did with your head, a family that expected their children to go to college and perhaps into a profession.

  The truth was that as a kid I was a little embarrassed by the home I came from. I used to imagine what it would be like to have a father who wore a suit and worked in an office; and what it would be like to live in an attractive house, because your house defined you in the eyes of your peers; that was where you came from. Often when I was walking the streets of the Springs I’d choose a house I’d like to say was my home; not a palace, a family place with a dash of class: shutters, wide verandahs, a garden with flowers, shrubs and a pond, and in a quiet well-trimmed street. I could anticipate the kind of confidence I would have had if the house I chose was really my home, without, at that early stage, appreciating that what was important was what went on inside the walls.

  In reality, our home, on Oak Street, where there were ironically no trees or hedges let alone oaks, was on a small lot of weedy grass close to the sidewalk with a chicken wire fence; it was in a row of similar houses, and faced a similar row across a busy street. Oak Street was a southern through-way for cars and trucks coming to town, and there was always the vibration of vehicle traffic. In contrast, the Blakes lived in the quiet Medina suburbs where the land rolled, and there were streams and trees. The architect-designed houses there exuded a sense of space and calm, or were snuggled away up secluded drives.

  The difference in houses said it all. At high school, I couldn’t have imagined taking Gail home to meet my mother and have a Coke, any more than I could have imagined being introduced to Mrs Blake in her living room. It wasn’t possible and I had lost no sleep in thinking it might be. I had understood and accepted in those days that I was part of one scene and Gail and her kind, another.

  But time had moved on. The days were ticking by towards my appointment with sandbags and trenches and jungle slime. I had come to think of my perception of my inferiority as childish and unreal. I was a graduate myself now with career options. I had also realised that the support I’d had from my parents and their peaceful life together had allowed me to live in a warm emotional environment, never mind the clapboard and tiles; it was an environment which I found wasn’t as common as I had thought.

  I didn’t debate with myself whether to make myself known to Gail Blake, who was surrounded by men; I finished my third or fourth shot of rye, thinking the light might go out for me in a matter of months, so what if she did tell me to get lost? What if she said she couldn’t remember who I was? What if she wasn’t even Gail Blake?

  I didn’t tell my drinking buddies what I had in mind, I just did it, like in Zen. I circled the bar, pushed into her admirers, eased them out of the way to get to her, received annoyed looks and finally stood before her. She lifted those startling purple-blue eyes to me and smiled with what seemed to be real pleasure and recognition.

  “Bob McDade, Saratoga High,” I said.

  “I know, Bob. I saw you before. I was going to come over.” She leaned close to me and put a hand on my arm.

  She was going to come over to me? My mouth was dry. I felt knuckles pressing against my spine, and low, disagreeable sounds coming from the officers I had interrupted.

  “Who are you, buddy?” one breathed.

  Gail frowned. “Come on, guys, lighten up. This is an old friend I have to talk to.”

  An old friend? That was pushing it. She took my hand and eased out of the group. We found a space standing in a corner and began a halting, telegraphic conversation in the noise; where I was posted, where she was posted, what work we were doing; we mentioned scattered reminders of the Springs.

  “Let me get you a drink,” I said, eventually.

  “No, Bob. Don’t leave me alone or we’ll get separated and you’ll have to haul me out – again.”

  I hadn’t hauled her out; that was the remarkable thing. She’d jumped out. I looked around the club distastefully. The vultures were waiting to fall on her. A good-looking and beribboned captain approached her.

  “I’ll talk to you later, Bill,” she said.

  The captain moved off, whispering over my shoulder, “May a VC round in excess of 45 calibre find its way up your anal passage, friend.”

  “What did he say?” Gail asked.

  “That I’m one lucky guy.”

  “Let’s go out somewhere, Bob, where we can talk.”

  I was astonished at the treatment I was getting. “We’ll find somewhere to eat.”

  “Oh, yes!” she said, enthusiastically.

  When we left the club together a warm blanket of air enfolded us on the street. The enticing lights of shops and restaurants were juxtaposed with the sinister silhouettes of armed soldiers and military vehicles. Gail pushed her arm under mine and hung on affectionately as though she really was an old friend.

  3

  I was still puzzled by the reception I had received from Gail at the Officers’ Club when we took our seats in Vu Pham’s Restaurant on Pleiku Boulevard. I had brought her to Vu Pham’s because I wanted a place which was likely to be out of the way of any friends of hers, and yet comfortable enough to give me the opportunity to talk intimately and find some answers.

  Vu Pham’s had white linen tablecloths, candles on the tables, and excellent seafood. None of the stringency of war showed.
About half the many patrons – it was crowded – were in service uniforms, and of those, not all were Americans.

  Gail and I drew ourselves into the relative intimacy of a booth and faced each other over tall, cold beers. Gail glanced at the menu and said she couldn’t think. “I’ll have the same as you, Bob.” I ordered peeled king prawns in a chilli sauce from memory. Our seats gave us space; we slipped off our jackets and loosened our ties. I offered her a cigarette and she said she didn’t smoke. How little I knew her and how little we had spoken since I shoved into that circle of men around her!

  “Hey, this is a nice place,” she said, looking round appreciatively but only being polite.

  She was tense with phrases and ideas that didn’t seem to want to come out. I had a chance to study her. She was more robust now than she had been at school; her face and her figure fuller. The seraphic look remained. Her hair flamed where the light touched it and her smile radiated innocent pleasure. Hers wasn’t a sensual face but a wise, touching one that stayed in the mind.

  “I felt you were kinda a million miles away when I saw you in the bar tonight, Gail. Mind you, you were about that distance at the High.”

  “I liked you in Saratoga, Bob. I thought we might be friends at school but it didn’t happen.”

  “That beats me: that you wanted to be friends. I never had a clue.”

  “Guess I’m not enough of a vamp.”

  I wasn’t going to go into how unattainable I thought she had been; it was part of a past almost too distant to be real. “Anyway, you have plenty of friends here.”

  “Big deal. Horny guys falling over themselves.”

  “Uh-huh.” I was uncertain what to say because I was surely horny too.

  She looked straight at me and reached out her hand to cover mine on the table. “You can be horny too,” she grinned.

  But I saw the shine of tears in the corners of her eyes.

  “It’s good to see a face I know, Bob, somebody from home. When I saw you tonight in the club it took me back. I knew I had to speak to you and I was going to come over. I was thinking what to do when I was with those guys. I was worried you mightn’t remember me. But I was determined to speak to you. And then you came over to me! I just felt so good and so lucky.”