One Very Hot Day Read online

  * * *

  For Elzbieta

  chapter one

  The seminary was outside of the little town. But the priests were all gone now, gone back to Europe. The Seminary now had massive fortifications, no enemy would storm it easily, miles and miles of barbed wire, mountains of sandbags, and on top a Vietnamese machine gunner, sometimes awake. By the gate there was a sentry and a huge sign which said: “Welcome. Eighth Infantry Division U. S. Advisory Group. Best There Is.” Under that was a caricature of an American officer with a huge grin, and then the initials W E T S U. There was no printed explanation for the initials but translated verbally to those who asked, civilians largely, they meant, We Eat This Shit Up.

  * * *

  Beaupre lay there asleep, a thin uncomfortable sleep, the sweat rolling off him, the giant fan above him no help, serving only to distribute equally the very hot air. He was so uncomfortable that when they sent someone to get him his nerves were already jarred, and he was instantly sure that they wanted him to go to war; that the night had passed, it was time for the operation. Volleyball, he heard dimly. Volleyball.

  “Hey Captain Beaupre. Volleyball?” They had sent a young Captain for him. Beaupre did not even know his name.

  “No,” he managed to say. “Jesus no, volleyball.”

  “They sent me to get you. We need a man. We've got nine. The others say you're supposed to.”

  “Do I look like I’m supposed to?” It was a good question: he was thirty-eight, looked older, heavy, almost fat; he was sweating without playing; he breathed and he sweated. “The U.S. government spent sixteen-hundred dollars to get me out here and it never said anything about volleyball.”

  “We need a man,” the Captain said doggedly; he was young and new at the Seminary and he had been preceded by impressive rumor-mongering. It was said he would make the early list for major.

  “You need a boy,” Beaupre corrected.

  “Colonel says volleyball's the exercise. You need it. We all need it.”

  “I don't need it,” Beaupre said. “I'm lazy. The rest of you get too much exercise.”

  Jesus, Beaupre thought, volleyball. Five o'clock in the afternoon and they were out there playing goddamn volleyball. They all played volleyball at the Seminary because there was nothing else to do. Grown men. Beaupre could hear them now in the background, shouting and grunting. It was the only thing to do and besides the Colonel liked it, and was good at it, the Colonel, small and wiry, saw himself as a feeder, very fast. The Colonel wasn't there, he was in Saigon, due back that night, the Colonel, lover and founder of the game; when they lacked a man, the Colonel would come into Beaupre's room and drag Beaupre out, making a small and almost pleasant spectacle of it, boasting; Look who wants to play, and Beaupre, dutifully requisitioned, would play, summoned only to even the sides, lunging gracelessly from the start, grunting loudly, in all a small and gentle humiliation.

  He had come to hate volleyball and he had gained a kind of private vengeance against them all when they had played the Vietnamese officers. The Vietnamese liked volleyball too, and the Colonel heard of this, and always anxious to improve relations had suggested a game of Us-against-Them. The Vietnamese officers accepted the invitation, perhaps a bit too readily, and the Colonel was very pleased. The Americans, prepared to be good winners, had fixed a giant barbecue for later. The Viets had come and played, thin, often scrawny men, odd in their much too long shorts, ludicrous in their old-fashioned undershirts (they were more modest than the Americans and did not strip to the waist). Seeing the Vietnamese and the tall powerful Americans, Beaupre had felt rare sympathy for the Viets. The game began and the Americans took a quick lead. When the Viets finally made some points the Americans very carefully applauded; this applause stopped when the Viets, old undershirts and all, made quick work of the Americans. Five games were played and won, ever more handily; by the end there was clapping for American points. It had been an embarrassing day; the Vietnamese behaved well and were careful not to throw the last game; the barbecue had gone reasonably well, but there had never been any suggestion of a rematch. Indeed for a time it dampened volleyball fever, but after a week, the Colonel, resilient as ever, had bounced back and reinstituted the American game.

  Beaupre listened to the game now; the briefing would be late that night after the Colonel returned. There would be a movie first. He had five hours before the briefing and yet if he slept, he would only feel worse later on. It was a tribute to how much he had come to dislike volleyball that despite the suffocating boredom of the Seminary he refused to watch them play; he tried to sleep a little more before the movie.

  The volleyball game was over and they were still waiting for the Colonel. He was due back a little later, driving back on the country's one highway against the orders of Saigon which disliked and distrusted the highway and thought he should take a helicopter; it would be very embarrassing if a Bird Colonel were ambushed and killed within forty miles of the main city. But the Colonel did not like Saigon, and rarely if he could help it, listened to it; he did like what he called looking at the countryside, and trying to find out who was in the lead. So while they waited for him at the Seminary they decided to show the movie first. Usually the movies were of Elvis Presley in Hawaii, or Doris Day in bed with someone, her pajamas unwrinkled, and her hair all in place, and the main excitement would come with Doris in bed, her teeth already brushed, when a lizard would start crawling across the wall which served as a screen. Someone, usually Raulston, would shout out what the lizard was about to do, and there would be great encouragement for the lizard, go to it old buddy, and some disappointment if the lizard backed off, that lizard can't cut the mustard, and tell him where to go Beaupre (in honor of Beaupre who was acknowledged the resident swordsman). Sometimes there would be another lizard, probably female, and thus in the middle of a cowboy film, or a Doris Day in Bed film, the attention would shift to the two lizards doing their ballet on the screen, with cheers for the male lizard, though Raulston who claimed to have studied biology insisted that they were all wrong, the aggressor lizard was the lady, and they were cheering the wrong lizard. On this night while they waited for the Colonel, they did not have Elvis or Doris, and the lizards were in the off season, but they had The Guns of Navarone, which as someone said was still playing in New York, yes said someone else, Watertown, New York. But it was still first run by their standards, their standards being whatever the Army sent down, which was what the Saigon officers did not choose to take. It was a fine movie filled with action and handsome mountains and beautiful color and Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn on the same side, though not trusting each other. It went very well until someone discovered Peck's defection and shouted: “He's a damn VC.”

  There was a slow sense of shock when he said it, and then slowly it dawned on everyone that it was true, that Peck was a Cong, and from then on the complexion of the picture changed sharply, and the loyalty to Peck ended abruptly, the hearts did not beat so fast when the Germans came near, and the beautiful girl, seemingly loyal to Peck, then step by step obviously betraying him, in the movie a fink, now a loyal government agent, drew occasional cheers. From then on they shouted encouragement to the German sentries, and when Peck and others repeatedly slipped by the sentries, Raulston ordered one of the sergeants out of the mess hall where the movie was being shown to check the perimeter and make sure that no Vietcong had slipped passed the sentries. When the Sergeant came back and said that one of the Vietnamese sentries had been asleep there was more laughter, which like the game they were now playing with the movie, eased the tension. On the screen the Germans, tipped off on the whereabouts of Peck and the others, were arresting them in the market. There was some cheering, but someone, sensing that it was too early in
the movie for Peck to die or disappear, shouted: “Don't take any prisoners.” Peck did escape and continued bravely on, putting down the revolt among the civil libertarians in his own group. Steadily they passed obstacle after obstacle, finally entering the guerrilla-proof gun batteries and, miracle of miracles, silencing the guns.

  “Hell of a good movie,” said Lieutenant Anderson, as they walked out.

  “Yes,” said Captain Beaupre, annoyed to find how little pleasure he had gotten, annoyed to find that Vietnam took the pleasure even out of Gregory Peek killing Germans.

  Beaupre checked his watch and saw that they had time for a drink before the briefing. “Buy this old man a drink,” he said to Anderson. They went to the bar and ordered one drink; Anderson did not want it very much, particularly he did not want it before the briefing, but in six months he had received few enough invitations to be with Beaupre to turn any down. While they were drinking, the Chaplain came over and appeared to drink with them (appeared to drink because Beaupre had long suspected that the Chaplain, who drank beer from the can, disliked alcohol and nursed one drink throughout the evening). The Chaplain was always at the bar, though never drunk, always the first to laugh at the dirty jokes, though never telling any himself. Beaupre almost felt sorry for him (which was a lifting of his general ban on chaplains) trying so hard to be one of the boys. It was a difficult war to be a chaplain in: the Americans here were mostly officers and older men, and the war itself was not yet hairy enough to drive them into the arms of a chaplain; the Chaplain spoke somewhat nostalgically about Korea and the type of army they had then. Beaupre told Anderson to buy the Chaplain a drink, saw both of them embarrassed, because Anderson was still young enough and innocent enough to be embarrassed by the Chaplain's presence at the bar. It was a scene which pleased Beaupre, the one golden young officer not wanting to buy a beer for the other who didn't want to drink it. It made the time pass faster for him, and he went out of his way to be polite to the Chaplain for the next half hour. He deliberately talked about Korea and how tough that was, and the Chaplain joined in. He had never been particularly nice to the Chaplain before, and he knew this made the Chaplain a little uneasy. It amused him until they were summoned for the briefing.

  The briefing made an odd scene, most of the men now on their way to bed, clad only in towels wrapped around them and Japanese shower shoes. Their physiques alone told much of the story of the changing army: the young ones, lean and hard and anxious to go, the older ones, in two wars already, showing some of the softness of the long years of peace and peacetime army diet, flabby around the middle. Most of them wore their professional tans: very red faces and forearms, and pale white elsewhere; only a handful of physical culturists, most of them in noncombat roles, had real tans; those who had to live and work under the Delta sun did not seek it on their days off. The Colonel was singularly white, even his neck was white; Beaupre had sometimes wondered how, he walked through operations, he had every chance to burn like everyone else, but he remained white. As a group they liked and trusted the Colonel, and he was popular for lying to them as little as possible; he was an easy man to read, direct and quick to anger; he was, Beaupre could tell, not happy about the day in Saigon, and not happy about the operation.

  He outlined, with a map and a pointer, the objective: a reported Vietcong rest house on a route traversing the area. “The Ho Chi Minh motel,” someone said, a used, but still popular joke.

  “How good's the intelligence, sir,” someone asked.

  “The Vietnamese,” he said, drawing the word out, very slowly for emphasis so that the word wasn't Vietnamese at all, it was they, “seem to think it's good enough.” Someone laughed. That was why they liked him.

  “Did we participate in the planning?” someone asked.

  “Did we participate in the planning?” the Colonel repeated, again deliberately. His face screwed up.

  “In a way. There were other places our friends wanted to go instead, places where we suspected the enemy did not exist and indeed had never heard of.” A pause for their smiles. “We expressed a preference for places where according to our photo reconnaissance the enemy is putting down rather solid defensive structures, and so we compromised on this, although Captain Donovan of our intelligence informs me that he suspects that this was the place where our friends wanted to go in the first place. I suspect that Captain Donovan's suspicions are correct.” Laughter. The Colonel, hearing it, smiled a polite little smile of his own pleasure; he was a modest man, more like a schoolteacher than a Colonel, and his manner and his tartness told Beaupre that the Colonel knew finally that he would never be a general, and that his wife would never be a general's wife; the Colonel, Beaupre gathered, had not been considered that much of a wit five years before.

  He began slowly to explain the operation. Three prongs. Two walking in. One flying in on helicopters, coming in after the others had moved. The villages they would touch. “Who will fly tomorrow,” said the Colonel, “who will be the glory leader and have his photograph taken jumping out of the helicopters?”

  Beaupre sat in the briefing and waited, hoping he looked impassive: perhaps, he thought, they will think I want it. He didn't want the helicopters and he didn't want the reserve force, which sat there by the CP and worked only when there was contact, and was dropped in, more often than not into a specially prepared second ambush; he wanted the ground troops. He looked around him and saw the other faces; some of them, the younger ones, eager, some impassive. Perhaps the impassive ones, he thought, want the helicopters too but are too proud to show it. Beaupre was a little older and probably a little more frightened than most. He watched the Lieutenant next to him, his lieutenant, the most eager face there. The Lieutenant wanted the helicopters; he liked the assault.

  “Let me pick a hero,” the Colonel said, his eyes wandering around the room. There was a brief pause. The Colonel enjoyed the drama of this. “Redfern, Captain Redfern,” he said. Redfern was Captain William Redfern known to all of them and particularly to himself as Big William. “You ready with those Rangers, Redfern?”

  “Big William and his Rangers always ready. Fact is, Colonel sir, they'd have hurt feelings they knew you asked a question like that, and maybe Big William even lose a little face with his Rangers.”

  “I don't like my men to lose face, Redfern, so you pass on my respects to them.”

  “Big William glad of that, sir, it hurt them Rangers somethin' awful, their man lose face.”

  He came from Pickens, Alabama, a huge giant of a Negro, a certified graduate, he said, of Snake Oil Tech—it even said Big William on his certificate, he claimed. He said he was supposed to get a pro football tryout but failed because Uncle Jim didn't want him to play; Uncle Jim who, someone asked him; Uncle Jim Crow, Senior, he said, what other Uncle Jim is there? But Uncle Jim too smart to keep Big William from trying out for the Army, that his way of making it all up to me. Big William was not polite, not cautious, not sensitive whose ears his boasts fell on; he was black as black can be, they never integrated with his family, he said; he walked with a sort of rolling sexual grace, and he always carried an ivory swagger stick which he used as if both to emphasize his grace and his color; his record player, oblivious to other men, and other tastes, ran constantly, blaring out dark-sounding sensuous music; oh and he talked endlessly, about his women, boasted constantly about them, made it clear they were not all black as black can be, and proclaiming the “finest piece of equipment south of Saigon, white, black or yellow, excluding the Vietcong because I ain't fraternized with any of their women yet, at least knowingly I ain't.” Not all these qualities were endearing, and there were constant arguments at the Seminary on how good Big William really was. Some of the younger officers liked him (and his music), were awed by his size, and accepted Big William's evaluation of himself. He was, the younger ones sometimes said, the best Negro officer they had ever seen; the others, older, particularly Raulston, said he was like all the rest of them, a bullshitter, the only difference w
as that he talked more, longer and louder than the others; you just don't know them, Raulston said, I've seen them all, and he ain't the best, they don't have a best, but maybe he's the worst, they got that. (The Colonel, pressed for an answer to this, for a solution one hot night when a private committee had arrived to complain about Big William's record player, only his record player, had said, “Oh, yes, he's a bullshitter, no doubt of that, never saw an officer boast as much as that one. Boasting isn't good for an officer and I don't want the rest of you trying it. Still he's a hell of a good officer. Funny thing is, he doesn't know it yet himself. He's too busy acting it out. Probably happened to him accidentally. He's not the best officer I have, not by a long shot, but he might be the best adviser. He's number one with the Vietnamese. They eat it up. Even the music.”) Which was true: the Vietnamese were in awe of him, his size, his color, his great deep voice, and he seemed to come alive in their presence, they were his very own kingdom. Each morning he would greet them: “Good morning, Vienamese,” he would say, and they would answer in a chant he taught them, “Good morning, Big William.” “How they hanging, Vienamese?” he would ask and they would answer, their voices thin like school children, "They hanging fine, Big William.”

  “I keep getting reports that the Rangers are losing their meanness and becoming civilized. Is this true, Big William?” the Colonel was saying.

  Big William shook his head like someone who has just been libeled and can't understand why. “Beg your pardon, but that ain't shit, Colonel sir. Big William watches them Rangers close, and he guarantees them nasty as ever. I catch them bein' gentlemen and I kickass special for you. Big William pass on what you said though, sir.”

  “All right, Captain Redfern, you take the helicopters and the heliborne assault.” Anderson's face showed obvious disappointment. Beaupre looked across the room to see if there were any sign on Big William's face, but there was just a small sign that the Rangers and their adviser had received their just due. “And Big William,” the Colonel added, “make them go, make them shagass.” The Negro nodded, “They goin' to fly tomorrow, Colonel, we won't even need the helichopters, them chopters only slow us down. You want us to shag, we goin' to shag by the numbers for you.” Until Big William's arrival the Rangers had always bewildered the Americans. They were supposed to be elite troops like the Marines and the Airborne, but they were not particularly effective and had regularly disappointed the Americans. (Donovan, the intelligence chief, claimed it was because they were elite in a different sense, troops turned over by regular units on the demand of officialdom, but not the best, and not the worst, simply, according to Donovan, the most disorderly and unmanageable.)