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Now Michael wanted to be outside, to be moving. According to the schedule he picked up at the registration desk downstairs, the parade up Constitution Avenue had already begun. By the time he had his first look at the Memorial and came back, the others would have checked in.
Unless, that is, Harry Beevers had managed to get drunk at the bar of Tina Pumo’s restaurant and was still asking for one more vodka martini, one more little teeny martooni, we’ll catch the five o’clock shuttle instead of the four o’clock, or the six o’clock, or the seven. Tina Pumo, the only one of the old group Poole saw with anything like regularity, had told him that Beevers sometimes spent all afternoon in his place. Poole’s only contact with Harry Beevers in four or five years had come three months before, when Beevers had called him up to read aloud a Stars and Stripes article, sent to Beevers by his brother, about a series of random murders committed in the Far East by someone who identified himself as Koko.
Poole stepped back from the window. It was not time for Koko, now. The giant in tiger stripes and jungle hat finished putting his note under one of the Camaro’s windshield wipers. What could it say? Sorry I beat up your car, man, come around for a shot of Jack –
Poole sat down on the edge of the bed, picked up the receiver, and after a second of hesitation dialed Judy’s number at school.
When she answered he said, ‘Well, I’m here, but the other guys haven’t checked in yet.’
‘Do you want me to say, “Poor Michael”?’ asked Judy.
‘No, I thought you’d like to know what’s going on.’
‘Look, Michael, is something special on your mind? This conversation has no point. You’re going to spend a couple of days going all drunk and sentimental with your old army buddies. Do I have any place in that? I’d just make you feel guilty.’
‘I still wish you’d have come along.’
‘I think the past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Does that tell you anything?’
‘I guess it does,’ Michael said. There was a moment of silence that went on too long. She would not speak until he did. ‘Okay,’ Michael finally said. ‘I’ll probably see Beevers and Tina Pumo and Conor tonight, and there are some ceremonies I’d like to take part in tomorrow. I’ll get home Sunday about five or six, I suppose.’
‘Your patients are extremely understanding.’
‘Diaper rash is rarely fatal,’ Michael said, and Judy uttered a smoky exhalation that might have been laughter.
‘Should I call you tomorrow?’
‘Don’t bother. It’s nice, but don’t bother, really.’
‘Really,’ Michael said, and hung up.
2
Michael moved slowly through the Sheraton’s lobby looking at the men lined up at the registration desk, among them the big cowboy in tiger-stripe fatigues and his three buddies, and the groups of people sitting on padded dark green chairs and banquettes. The Sheraton was one of those hotels with no true bar. Women in clinging, filmy dresses brought drinks to the twenty or thirty tables in the sunken lobby. The waitresses all seemed to have descended from the same tall, languid, handsome family. Where these princesses might normally have served gin-and-tonics and Perriers-and-lime to men with dark suits and power haircuts – to men like Michael Poole’s neighbors in Westchester County – now they set down shots of tequila and bottles of beer before wildmen in battle jackets and bush hats, in funky fatigues and funkier khaki ballcaps.
The sulphurous conversation with his wife made Michael want to sit down among the wildmen and order a drink. But if he sat down, he would be drawn into things. Someone would begin to talk to him. He would buy a drink for a man who had been in some of the same places he had been, or had been near the places he had been, or who had a friend who had been near those places. Then the man would buy him a drink. This would lead to stories, memories, theories, introductions, vows of brotherhood. Eventually he would join the parade as part of a gang of strangers and see the Memorial through the thick insulating comfort of alcohol. Michael kept moving.
‘Cavalry all the way!’ shouted a whiskey voice behind his back.
Michael went through a side door out into the parking lot. It was just a little too cold for his tweed jacket and sweater, but he decided not to go back upstairs for his coat. The heavy billowing sky threatened rain, but Michael decided that he didn’t much care if it rained.
Cars streamed up the ramp from the street. Florida license plates, Texas plates, Iowa and Kansas and Alabama, every kind and make of vehicle, from hardcore GM pickups to tinny Japanese imports. The van cowboy and his friends had driven to Washington from New Jersey, the Garden State. Tucked beneath the Camaro’s windshield wiper was the note: You were in my way so FUCK YA!!!
Down on the street, Michael flagged a cab and asked the driver to take him to Constitution Avenue.
‘You gonna walk in the parade?’ the driver immediately asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re a vet, you were over there?’
‘That’s right.’ Michael looked up. From the back, the cabdriver could have been one of the earnest, desperate, slightly crazed students doomed to flunk out of medical school: colorless plastic glasses, dishwater hair, pale youthful skin. His ID plate said that his name was Thomas Strack. Blood from an enormous pimple had dried on the collar of his shirt.
‘You ever in combat? Like in a firefight or something?’
‘Now and then.’
‘There’s somethin’ I always wanted to ask – I hope you don’t take no offense or nothing.’
Michael knew what the cabdriver was going to ask. ‘If you don’t want me to take offense, don’t ask an offensive question.’
‘Okay.’ The driver turned his head to glance at Michael, then looked straight ahead again. ‘Okay, no need to get heavy.’
‘I can’t tell you how it feels to kill someone,’ Michael said.
‘You mean you never did it.’
‘No, I mean I can’t tell you.’
The cabbie drove the rest of the way in boiling silence. You coulda told me something. Gimme a little gore, why don’t you? Lemme see that good old guilt, lemme see that fine old rapture. The past is in the past because that’s where it belongs. Don’t bother, really. You were in my way, so fuck ya.
I’ll take a triple Finlandia martini on the rocks, please, hold the olives, hold the vermouth, please, hold the rocks, please, and get the same thing for my four hundred buddies in here, please, They might look a little funny, but they’re my tribe.
‘This okay?’ the cabbie asked. Beside the car was a wall of people. Michael could see flags and men carrying banners suspended between poles. He paid the driver and left the cab.
Michael could see over the heads of most of the people lining the sidewalk. Here the tribe had gathered, all right. Men who had once been soldiers, most of them dressed as though they were still soldiers, filled the width of Constitution Avenue. In platoon-sized groups interspersed with high school bands, they marched raggedly down the street. Other people stood on the sidewalk and watched them go by because they approved of what they were, what they meant because of what they had done. By standing there the bystanders applauded. Until now, Michael realized, he had resisted fully believing in the reality of this parade.
It was not ticker tape and limousines on Fifth Avenue – the Iranian hostages had been given that one – but in most ways this was better, being more inclusive, less euphoric but more emotional. Michael edged through the people on the sidewalk. He stepped off the curb and fell in behind the nearest large and irregular group. Surprised tears instantly filled his eyes.
The men before him were three-fourths jungle fighters with everything but Claymores and M-16s, and one-fourth pudgy WWII vets who looked like ex-boxers. Michael realized that the sun had come out only when he saw their long shadows stretching out to him on the street.
He could see Tim Underhill, another long shadow, striding along with his belly before him and cigar smoke drifting in his wake. In his mind, Underhill was muttering obscene hilarious remarks about everyone in sight and wearing his summer uniform of a bandanna and blousy fatigue pants. A streak of mosquito blood was smeared across his left shoulder.
In spite of everything, Michael wished that Underhill were beside him now. Michael realized that he had been considering Underhill – not brooding or thinking about him, considering him – since Harry Beevers had called him at the end of October to tell him about the newspaper articles his brother had sent him from Okinawa.
In two separate incidents, three people, an English tourist in his early forties and an older American couple, had been murdered in Singapore just about the time the Iranian hostages had returned to America. The murders were thought to have been committed at least a week to ten days apart. The Englishman’s body was found on the grounds of the Goodwood Park Hotel, those of the American couple in a vacant bungalow in the Orchard Road section of the city. All three bodies had been mutilated, and on two of them had been found playing cards scrawled with an unusual and enigmatic name: Koko. Six months later, in the summer of 1981, two French journalists were found similarly mutilated in their Bangkok hotel room. Playing cards with the same name had been placed on the bodies. The only difference between these killings and those that had happened after Ia Thuc, a decade and a half earlier, was that the cards were not regimental, but ordinary commercial playing cards.
Michael thought Underhill lived in Singapore. At least Underhill had always claimed that he was going to move there after he got out of the army. But Poole could not make the mental leap required to convict Tim Underhill of murder.
Poole had known two extraordinary human beings during his time in Vietnam, two men who had stood out as exceptionally worthy of respect and affection in the half-circus, half-laboratory of human behaviour that a longstanding combat unit becomes. Tim Underhill was one, and a boy from Milwaukee named M.O. Dengler was the other. The bravest people he had ever known, Underhill and little Dengler had seemed perfectly at home in Vietnam.
Tim Underhill had gotten himself back to the Far East as soon as possible after the war and had become a moderately successful crime novelist. M. O. Dengler was killed in a freakish street accident while on R&R in Bangkok with another soldier, named Victor Spitalny, and never returned from Asia at all.
Oh, Michael Poole missed Underhill. He missed them both, Underhill and Dengler.
The group of vets behind Michael, as scattered and varied as those before him, gradually caught up with him. He became aware that he was no longer marching alone, but was moving along between the crowds lining both sides of the street with a couple Dengler-sized boonie-rats, fiercely moustached, and an assortment of polyester-suited VFW types.
As if he had been reading his thoughts, one of the Denglersized boonie-rats walking beside Michael sidled up to him and whispered something. Michael bent down, cupping his ear.
‘I was a hell of a fighter, man,’ the little ex-soldier whispered a shade louder. Tears gleamed in his eyes.
‘To tell you the truth,’ Michael said, ‘you remind me of one of the best soldiers I ever knew.’
‘No shit.’ The man nodded briskly. ‘What outfit was you in?’
Poole named his division and his battalion.
‘What year?’ The man cocked his head to check out Poole’s face.
‘’Sixty-eight, ‘sixty-nine.’
‘Ia Thuc,’ the boonie-rat said immediately. ‘I remember that. That was you guys, right? Time magazine and all that shit?’
Poole nodded.
‘Fuckin’-A. They shoulda give that Lieutenant Beevers a fuckin’ Medal of Honor for what he done, and then took it away again for shootin’ off his mouth in front of fuckin’ journalists,’ the boonie-rat said, sidling away with an easy fluid motion that would have been noiseless if they had been walking over brittle twigs.
Two fat women with short fluffy hair, pastel pantsuits, and placid church-picnic faces were rhythmically waving between them a red banner with the stark black letters POW-MIA. A few paces behind marched two youngish ex-soldiers bearing another banner: COMPENSATE FOR AGENT ORANGE. Agent Orange –
Victor Spitalny had tilted his head and stuck out his tongue, claiming that the stuff tasted good. You motherfuckers, drink it down! This shit’s boo-koo good for your insides! Washington and Spanky Burrage and Trotman, the black soldiers on the detail, cracked up, falling into the thick jungly growth beside the trail, slapping each other on the back and sides, repeating ‘boo-koo good for your insides’ and enraging Spitalny, whom they knew had only been trying, in his stupid way, to be funny. The smell of Agent Orange, halfway between gasoline and industrial solvent, stuck to all of them until sweat and insect repellent and trail grime either covered it up or washed it off.
Poole caught himself wiping the palms of his hands together, but it was too late to wash away the Agent Orange.
How does it feel to kill somebody? I can’t tell you because I can’t tell you. I think maybe I got killed myself, but not before I killed my son. You shit in your pants, man, you laugh so hard.
3
By the time Michael Poole reached the park, the parade had melted down into a wandering crowd, marchers and onlookers moving together across the grass. Loose, ragged groups streamed over the entire landscape, walking through the sparse trees, filling the whole scene. Though he could not see the Memorial, Michael knew where it was. About a hundred yards before him, the crowds were moving down a grade into a natural bowl from which came the psychic flare of too many people. The Memorial stood at the bottom of all those people. Michael’s scalp tingled.
A phalanx of men in wheelchairs were pushing themselves across the long stretch of grass before the bowl. One of the chairs tilted over sideways and a gaunt, black-haired, legless man with a shockingly familiar face spilled out. Michael’s heart froze – the man was Harry Beevers. Michael started to run forward to help. Then he checked himself. The fallen man was surrounded by friends, and in any case he could not be Poole’s old lieutenant. Two others righted the chair. They held it steady as the man braced himself on his stumps. Then he pushed himself up onto the metal footrests. The man reached up, grasped the armrests, and with neat gymnastic skill deposited himself in his own seat.
The men in wheelchairs were gradually overtaken by the crowd. Michael looked around him. All about were familiar faces which at second glance resolved into the faces of strangers. Various large bearded versions of Tim Underhill were moving toward the grassy bowl, also several wiry Denglers and Spitalnys. A beaming, round-faced Spanky Burrage slapped the palm of a black man in a Special Forces hat. Poole wondered what had happened to the dap, the complicated series of handgrips that blacks in Vietnam used to greet one another. There had been a wonderful mixture of seriousness and poker-faced hilarity about daps.
People streamed down into the bowl. Old women and babies clutched tiny flags. To Michael’s right, two young men on crutches were followed by an old gaffer, his bald head factory-white, with a row of medals pinned above the left pocket of his plaid shirt. Beside him a florid septuagenarian in a VFW garrison cap struggled with a shiny four-sided walker. Poole looked into the face of every man roughly his own age, and found most of them looking back at him – a crossfire of frustrated recognitions. He took a step forward across the trampled grass and looked straight ahead.
The Memorial was a long, intermittently visible line of sheer black tying together the heads and bodies of the people before it. Men ranged all along its top, walking along over its crew cut of grass as if pacing it off. Others lay down and leaned over to trace names engraved in the polished stone. Poole moved several steps forward, the crowded bowl in front of him widened and fell away, and the entire scene stood before him.
The huge broken black wing of the Memorial was surrounded by people without being engulfed by them. Poole imagined that it would take a lot to engulf this Memorial. Pictures had not quite conveyed its scale. Its strength came from its mass. Only inches high at the tapered ends, it rose to more than twice the height of a man at its folded center. Separated from it by a foot or so of earth already sprouting little flags, letters pinned to sticks, wreaths, and photographs of the dead, a sloping path of granite blocks ran its length.
The people before this emphatic scar in the earth passed slowly before the increasingly tall panels. Now and then they paused to lean forward and touch a name. Michael saw a lot of embraces. A skinnier version of an unloved basic training sergeant was inserting a handful of small red poppies one by one into the cracks between the panels. From immediately in front of the Memorial, a large wedge-shaped crowd fanned upward into the grassy bowl. A dense impacted wave of emotion came from all of these people.
Here was what was left of the war. The Vietnam War consisted of the names etched into the Memorial and the crowd either passing back and forth before those names or standing looking at them. For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place – Vietnam was many thousands of miles distant, with an embattled history and an idiosyncratic and inaccessible culture. Its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not Vietnam; that was here, in these American names and faces.
The ghost-Underhill had appeared beside Michael again, kneading one beefy shoulder with bloody fingers – bright smears of insect blood across his tanned skin. Ah, Lady Michael, they’re all good folks, they just let themselves get messed up by the war, that’s all. A dry chuckle. We didn’t do that, did we, Lady Michael? We tend to be above it all, don’t we? Tell me we do.
I thought I saw you smash in a car to get to a parking space, Poole said to this imaginary Tim Underhill.
I only smash up cars on paper.
Underhill, did you kill those people in Singapore and Bangkok? Did you put the Koko cards on their bodies?
I don’t think you’d better pin that one on me, Lady Michael.
‘Airborne!’ someone shouted.
‘Airborne all the way!’ someone else shouted back.
Poole worked his way closer to the Memorial through the mostly stationary crowd. The sergeant who looked like his old sergeant from Fort Sill was now slipping the tiny red poppies into the crack between the last two tall panels. Protruding from between the panels, the little poppies reflected twice, so that two black shadows lay behind each red dart. A big wild-haired man held up a Texas-sized flag with a waving golden fringe. Poole stepped up beside a Mexican family posted directly beside the granite walk and for the first time saw the reflection in the tall black panel. Mirrored people streamed before him. The reflections of the Mexican family, a man and a woman, a pair of teenage girls, and a small boy holding a flag, all stared at the same spot on the wall. Between them, the reflected parents held a framed photograph of a young Marine. Poole’s own uptilted head seemed, like the others, to be searching for a specific name. Then, as in an optical illusion, the real Poole saw names leap out from the black wall. Donald Z. Pavel, Melvin O. Elvan, Dwight T. Pouncefoot. He looked at the next panel. Art A. McCartney, Cyril P. Downtain, Masters J. Robinson, Billy Lee Barnhart, Paul P. J. Bedrock. Howard X. Hoppe. Bruce G. Hyssop. All the names seemed strange and familiar, in equal measure.
Someone behind him said ‘Alpha Papa Charlie,’ and Michael turned his head, his ears tingling. Now people completely filled the shallow bowl. They covered the rise behind it. Alpha Papa Charlie. Without asking, there was no way of telling which of the men, white-haired, bald, pony-tailed, with faces clear and pockmarked, seamed and scarred, electric with feeling, had spoken. From a huddle of four or five men in jungle hats and green jackets came another, rougher voice saying ‘…lost him outside Da Nang.’
Da Nang. That was in I Corps, his Vietnam. For a moment or two there Poole could not move his arms or legs. Into him streamed place names he had not remembered for fourteen years – Chu Lai, Tarn Ky. Poole saw a narrow dirt alleyway behind a row of huts; he smelled the clumps of drying marijuana hanging from the ceiling of a lean-to where a mamasan with the irresistible name of Si Van Vo lived and prospered. The Dragon Valley, oh God. Phu Bai, LZ Sue, Hue, Quang Tri. Alpha Papa Charlie. On the other side of a collection of thatched huts a line of water buffalos moved across a mud plain toward a mountain trail. Millions of bugs darkened the humid air. Marble Mountain. All those charming little places between the Annamese Cordillera and the South China Sea, where the dead SP4 Cotton, killed by a sniper named Elvis, had lazily spun in frothing pink water. The A Shau Valley: yea, though I walk…
Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil. Michael could see M. O. Dengler bouncing along a high narrow trail, grinning over his shoulder at him, blivets and ammunition strung across his back. On the other side of Dengler’s joyous face was a green, unfolding landscape of unbelievable depth and delicacy, plunging thousands of feet into mists, shading into dozens of different shades of green and rolling on all the way to a green, heavenly infinity. You been bad? Dengler had just asked him. If you haven’t, you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley…
Poole finally realized he was weeping.
‘Polish on both sides, yeah,’ said an old woman’s voice quite near him. Poole wiped his eyes, but they filled again, so quickly he saw nothing but colorful blurs. ‘Whole neighborhood was Polish, both sides, up and down. Tom’s father was in the Big One, but the emphysema kept him home today.’ Poole took his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to his eyes and tried to bring his crying under control. ‘I said, old man, you can do what you like but nothin’ is gonna keep me away from DC, come Veteran’s Day. Don’t you worry, son, nobody here minds if you cry your eyes out.’
Poole slowly realized that this last comment had been directed at him. He lowered his handkerchief. An obese white-haired woman in her sixties was looking at him with grand-motherly concern. Next to her stood a black man in a faded Special Forces jacket, an Anzac hat astride an unruly Afro.
‘Thanks,’ Poole said. ‘This thing’ – he gestured behind him at the Memorial – ‘finally got to me.’
The black ex-soldier nodded.
‘Actually, I heard somebody say something, can’t even remember what it was now…’
‘Yeah, me too,’ said the black man. ‘I heard somebody say “about twenty klicks from An Khe,” and I…my damn stomach just disappeared.’
‘I I Corps,’ Michael said. ‘You were a little south of me. Name’s Michael Poole, nice to meet you.’
‘Bill Pierce.’ The two men shook hands. ‘This lady here is Florence Majeski. Her son was in my unit.’
Poole had a strong, sudden desire to put his arms around the old woman, but he knew that he would break down again if he did that. He asked the first question that came to mind: ‘You get that hat off an ARVN?’
Pierce grinned. ‘Snatched it right off, riding by in a jeep. Poor little bastard.’
Then he knew what he really wanted to ask Pierce. ‘How can you find the names you’re looking for, in all this crowd?’
‘There’s Marines at both ends of the Memorial,’ Pierce said, ‘and they have books with all the names and the panels they’re on. Or you could ask one of the yellow caps. They’re just here today, on account of all the extra people.’ Pierce glanced at Mrs Majeski.
‘They had Tom right there in the book,’ the old lady said.
‘I see one over thataway,’ Pierce said, pointing off to Michael’s right. ‘He’ll find it for you.’ In the midst of a little knot of people, a tall, bearded, young white man in a yellow duckbill cap was consulting sheets in a looseleaf binder and then gesturing toward specific panels.
‘God bless you, son,’ said Mrs Majeski. ‘If you’re ever in Ironton, Pennsylvania, I want you to stop in and pay us a visit.’
‘Good luck,’ Pierce said.
