The Man Who Walked Away From War, Part V

       We left the bush two weeks later. Nobody made much mention of Moreland. His departure cut the squad to five, half our authorized strength. While still in the bush, Wizard, Marsetti and I shared a hole, with Hunter and Billy D in the other position. That made sense, other than the fact that I couldn’t man a position by myself. With three in a hole, Wizard had more protection for his machine gun.

       A new guy was in the squad tent when we got back to base camp, his fatigues clean and shiny, black dye on his boots not yet worn off. His name was John Adams, and he was a dumb fuck, all piss and vinegar, said right away, “I can’t wait to get a shot at those fuckin Viet Cong.” A month later, Adams walked outside the column we formed in the bush, stepped on one of those things that went “Click!” just before the striker hit the fuse. Adams screamed real loud and often until Doc Matthews stuck him with morphine.

       The first day back at base camp, we showered and signed for new uniforms and took the uniforms to the laundry point just outside the wire, had patches and name tags sewn on. That night, everybody got slap-happy drunk. On day two, Sergeant Reid said we needed to replace sandbags around the tent. The old ones had rotted and the sand was falling out. When Hunter passed the word, we argued with the decision.

       “Fuck,” Billy D said. “What difference does it make? We’re always in the fuckin bush, we don’t spend any time in the fuckin tent.” But we did as we were told. We knew better than to argue with Sergeant Reid.

       After a couple hours taking down old bags and shoving them inside new ones, Hunter suggested a break. He and Marsetti went to the orderly room to convince the CO’s driver to lend the jeep for a quick trip to the PX. Wizard and Billy D drifted off somewhere. I sat on a pile of new sandbags in the shade of a bamboo growth, smoking and wondering how Moreland was doing, wherever he was. I looked up from meditation when a voice said, “Excuse me.”

       The soldier’s jungle fatigues were sun bleached, but recently laundered, with sharp creases and no old mud spots. His boots were polished, and the canvas uppers faded but still retaining enough green that I knew he had not been in the bush.

       The soldier said, “You’re Robert Matthews?”

       I nodded. “Yep.”

       “Howard Thompson,” he said. “I’m a clerk in battalion personnel.” He almost flinched when I gave him my best “So?” look. Then he said, “Keith said I could talk to you.”

       “Who?”

       “Keith,” Thompson said. “Keith Moreland.”

       I felt my eyebrows rise. “Talk about what?”

       Thompson leaned against the pile of empty sandabags. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said. “I mean, if anybody found out ... ” He left the remainder unspoken.

       I laughed. “Well fuck me. You and Moreland met on the airplane coming over. And you played basketball back in Iowa.”

       “Basketball?” Thompson’s face got this confused look. “Nah. Keith was a lousy basketball player. We played on different baseball teams.”

       “He said basketball.”

       “It was baseball. We weren’t starters. Mostly we rode the bench.”

       “Yeah. So, Moreland’s at some truck company up the coast.”

       “Four-Oh-Seventh Transportation Company,” Thompson said. “It’s at Phu Bat.”

       “Is there a beach?”

       Thompson nodded. “A nice one, Keith says. Not like California, I guess. From pictures, I mean. I’ve never been on a beach.”

       “Not many in Iowa, huh.” I mashed my cigarette into the dirt, then shook another from a plastic case. I offered a smoke to Thompson.

       “No, thanks,” he said. “It’s too hot.”

       “Yeah.” I lit the cigarette for myself, wishing for a cool room and a cup of real coffee, not too hot. “So how’s Moreland doing at the beach?”

       “He’s okay.” Thompson pulled a sprig of dry grass from the dusty ground. “He’s good with cars. Army trucks won’t give him any problems.”

       Not like we did, I thought. Not at all. An inanimate object like a truck, something mechanical -- Moreland would do just fine.

       “Besides,” Thompson was saying, “the guys in the truck company, they don’t know anything about the bush.”

       I laughed. “Yeah, Moreland has lots of stories about the bush. I guess those drivers are just about transfixed when he tells those stories.” I could see it; oh, how I could see it. Moreland in a hooch at night, maybe every night, and there are fans moving the air, making everybody think the tent is less hot than an oven. Moreland sitting on a footlocker, maybe even in a lawn chair, sucking up a beer -- a cold beer -- and saying: “I remember this time we were in the Hobo Woods ... ” and the other truck drivers hanging on every word. They’d figure him out eventually, though. The other drivers would tire of Moreland’s stories, and then what? Another audience lost.

       Wrapped up in what I thought Moreland was doing, I almost didn’t hear Thompson. “ ... Keith’s letter,” he said.

       “Pardon?”

       “You might want to read Keith’s letter. He said he couldn’t send it direct to you, to the company. Somebody might ask questions, you get a letter from in-country.” Thompson pulled an envelope from a pocket. “He sent it through me. I got a letter, too, and there was this envelope inside, addressed to you.”

       I took the envelope, seeing my name in block letters. Holding the envelope lightly, I said, “You and Moreland decided this some time ago.”

       Thompson nodded. “The last time you guys were in. He came to my hooch and ... Well, I decided to help him out.” He shrugged, laughing lightly. “Home boys and all that.”

       “Home boys?” I said. “Shee-it.” Then I waved a hand. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

       “Well,” Thompson said. “I figured I’d bring by Keith’s letter.”    

       I thought about what Thompson said, that he and Moreland talked about the transfer the last time we were in. That would have been just before Moreland told us about Charlotte and Charlene and the Friddle cousins.

       Thompson stood, saying, “I guess I’d better get back.”

       “Hold on a minute,” I said. “Did Moreland tell you about Charlotte and Charlene?”

       Thompson shook his head. “Not that I remember.”

       “He didn’t, then,” I said. “If he had, you’d remember.”

       “Girls from back home?” Thompson asked.

       I shrugged. “They went to school together. I’ve got pictures.” I stood, saying, “Hang on. I’ll get them.”

       Thompson hadn’t moved when I got back. I unfolded the clear plastic and handed the pictures to him. Thompson stared at the girls.

       “Wow,” he said. “Nice. Better than nice. They twins?”

       I sat on the sandbags. “No.”

       “Hard to believe,” Thompson said. He handed back the pictures. “Keith and ... They both his girlfriends?”

       “That’s what he said.” I folded the plastic carefully around the pictures and slid them into a trouser cargo pocket. “How’d you transfer Moreland? I mean, there’s a personnel sergeant, isn’t there? And the S-1 officer?”

       “Yeah,” Thompson said. “Sergeant Miller doesn’t stick around too much. He’s got deals going with the S-4 sergeant. Battalion supply. You know how some lifers are, out to get what they can.” He laughed. “Captain Stephenson doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s been here a month.”

       “So with the personnel NCO gone and a new dufus officer, you guys are pretty much left on your own?”

       Thompson nodded. “We stick papers under Stephenson’s nose, he signs them. Course, when Keith came back that night, I sort of had to fake his transfer orders, forge Stephenson’s name.” He shrugged. “That’s a court martial offense, but who’s going to know? Next day, I made up a real set of orders, mostly guys going home, stuck in a paragraph transferring Keith. There was a load of paperwork that day. Stephenson signed everything.”

       “What about his Two-Oh-One?” I asked. “Personnel records are kept in the company orderly room.”

       Thompson shrugged again, as though the whole thing had been so simple. “A few days before Keith came back, I went to your company clerk. I told him the IG was checking ten percent of the battalion’s personnel files. I pulled that many files and made sure Keith’s was one of them.”

       “That’s all there was to it?”

       Thompson nodded. “Yep. Keith took his Two-Oh-One with him. The day after he left, I brought back the other files and told your clerk, Hawley, that we got transfer orders on Keith.”

       “Yeah, but ... What about when our CO called in and said Moreland was missing?”

       “Think about it,” Thompson said. “Things are so fucked up around here, who’s got time to check on a soldier who might have left the field? All I had to do was tell Stephenson I’d heard about the search for Keith, then show him the orders. He called the battalion executive officer and told him about the transfer. Simple.”

       Simple. I laughed -- God how I laughed. Simple. We bust our asses in the bush, each and every squad down to five or six or seven men, the platoon short fifteen or twenty, and for what? (Years later I would read somebody’s analysis of the war, and the author said you could ask a dozen 19-year-old grunts why they were in Vietnam, and the answers would be the same: “Kill gooks.” You can take that analysis a step further. Anybody who was in Vietnam, his job was to kill gooks. If you weren’t killing them face-to-face, you were yanking a lanyard on a howitzer that sent a big-ass shell somewhere in the bush, and the purpose of the shell was to kill gooks. If you weren’t spraying the bush with your M-16 on rock and roll, you were operating a radio that called up an Air Force Forward Air Controller, and the FAC called in F-105 or F-4 fighter-bombers, and the aircraft dropped 250-pound bombs or 500-pound bombs, and the bombs killed gooks. If you weren’t humping the bush day after day, with ruck straps eating into your shoulders, you were maintaining personnel records, rotating soldiers in and out so incoming soldiers could kill gooks. If you were a medic or a doctor or a nurse, you patched people and put them back together so they could -- maybe -- return to the bush and kill gooks. Simple.)

       When I had laughed myself out, I looked at Thompson. He smiled this conspiratorial smile. I asked, “Why? Why did Moreland do it?”

       “He wanted out,” Thompson said.

       “Out of the bush? Jesus, who doesn’t?”

       Thompson made a small shrug. “Part of it was my doing, I guess. You guys think all we do is sit in a tent all day and bang on typewriters, don’t you.”

       “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t you?”

       “To an extent, yes.” He made the shrug again. “And you think the war stops at five o’clock for us. Excuse me. At seventeen hundred. When the war stops, we go back to our hooches and drink cold beer, maybe listen to our stereos, write letters home on clean paper. No mud, no dirt. You call us REMFs. Rear-Echelon Motherfuckers.”

       “That we do,” I said.

       “And you’re right,” Thompson said. “Once a month, maybe twice, we go on perimeter guard, take our M-16s, the ones we’ve never fired and hope to God we never do.” He laughed. “Some guys, they never clean their weapons. The things wouldn’t fire even if the gooks made an all-out attack. Anyway, we sit in those bunkers, scared shitless the gooks will come, hoping maybe they do so’s we can write home about it.”

       “Hell,” I said. “You want something to write home about, haul your ass out in the bush.”

       “No,” Thompson interrupted. “Not me.” He smiled. “You got a cigarette? I left mine at my typewriter.”

       I took out the plastic case, shook out a smoke. Even lit the cigarette for him.

       “Thanks,” Thompson said. He dragged on the cigarette. “The thing is, when you guys get in some heavy shit, take casualties, the records come through me. I get a note from a hospital or aid station somewhere, so-and-so is KIA, get his records from his company and send them through channels. Make sure they’re up to date, type in any medals he was awarded, make sure there’s a beneficiary listed for the insurance. That sort of thing.” He blew smoke into the hot air. “I get tired of it, you know?”

        I studied Thompson before answering, taking in his clean uniform and polished boots, clean-shaven face and those sad eyes. Then I lit another cigarette and through the smoke said, “Bullshit.”

       He was shocked. It was all over his face -- disbelief that I did not believe him.

       “Bullshit,” I said again. “You and Moreland, you cook up this plan to get him out of the bush, and then you come here with some bullshit story about how sorry you are people get killed.” He started to speak, but I cut him off. “Nah, Man. You should have stuck with the homeboy story. That, I believe.” I shook my head. “Nah, hunh-unh. See, Moreland was a sorry soldier, is a sorry excuse for a soldier. We hump the bush, Thompson. We do it because The Man tells us to, because we have to. Moreland ... Moreland never understood. Moreland never will understand, and neither will you.” I waved a hand, dismissing Thompson. “Now, why don’t you take yourself back to your clerk tent and beat on your typewriter.”

       Thompson stood slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Keith said you would understand why he left. I guess he was wrong.”

       I nodded. “I guess he was. Field strip that cigarette. I ain’t policing up shit left by a dufus like you.”