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.”
