one who could—and he’d always done his best for me.
But I wasn’t in the mood to think of what a great brother he was. Even so, as I lay there on my bed, music playing quietly, staring at the treads on one of my Ho Chi Minhs, I could feel the steam leak out of my attempt to stay angry with Chris about missing the party. And a chance with Laura. I tried to shift the focus, be angry with Mom, but I couldn’t keep that up. I knew why she’d thrown the fork. I understood. As long as Chris was here, he was safe. Staying for Thanksgiving would be great, but really it was the staying that mattered. The being home, away from the danger, away from the possibility that one of those casualty reports could include him. Away—far away—from the knock on the door when some stateside colonel, hat in hand, might come to tell us the last thing we wanted to hear.
But I knew what Dad was saying, too. Maybe Mom couldn’t—or wouldn’t—imagine the tug Chris must feel from over there all the while he was home, but I could. And I knew that if I were Chris, I couldn’t really enjoy that terrific meal. And even if I did, I’d feel guilty.
Christ, this whole fucking mess had everyone fighting. Just the previous week in school, Terry Cavanaugh and this other kid, Bobby Darnell, got into it but good. I didn’t catch the whole thing, but it sounded like Bobby was talking up his brother Ken’s escapades, how many VC he’d killed, that sort of thing. I heard Terry shout something about certain people having messiah complexes, thinking they could go over there and save the world, which of course set Bobby off, and we had to pull them apart.
“Easy, man, easy,” I mumbled into Terry’s ear as Kevin Dodge helped me hold on to him and back away. Two other guys were taking charge of Bobby. We barely got things quiet before a teacher or somebody saw, so no one got in trouble, but it just goes to show you. War is war, and it spreads.
That little episode got me thinking about loyalty. I mean, Terry was trying real hard to be loyal to his brother Ron, but Ron—hell, he fucking skipped the country! So guys like Chris and Ken, they went over, and damn it, Chris was no martyr. He didn’t think he was Jesus Christ. And I don’t think Ken thought he was, either. But to be honest, I was a little angry at Ron, and maybe even at Terry for sticking up for him. But I was also mad at Chris for going.
And before too long, I’d be mad at Dad for making him go. This was something I didn’t allow myself to think about. Not even that night, meditating on the tire-tread sandals. But now? Now I do.
Chapter 2
The whole time Chris was home, we all kept pumping him for stories. Sometimes he really didn’t want to talk, and Mom would shoo us away. Other times he talked, and he did his best to walk a line between satisfying Dad’s thirst for guts and glory and Mom’s reluctance to think of her favorite child in danger. He was always good at that—keeping everybody satisfied. So he tried to let us know what his day-to-day life was like and tried not to paint too grim a picture.
Over Thursday dinner he told us about this one mission his squad got sent on, where they had to be lookouts for some other guys sweeping for mines. The VC are always coming into areas where the mines have just been found, and replanting them.
There were a couple of guys, not Chris’s squad, walking down this dirt road, swinging metal detectors around and watching for spots that looked like they’d just been dug. Behind them there was an armored dump truck, loaded with dirt, that was retrofitted to drive backward, and the driver was way up high above the truck in a special little cab. This truck followed the two minesweeping guys a couple hundred feet behind, and some guys in Chris’s squad were way out in front of the minesweepers, and some stayed well behind the truck, and they were all watching for snipers. The idea was that if the minesweepers missed anything and the truck ran over it, the truck would set it off. The dirt was to keep the truck from getting blown far, and the driver was supposed to get thrown to safety from the cab.
Chris said the trouble with this plan was that the driver was so far above ground that unless he landed in water, he was probably gonna get hurt pretty bad. So, as Chris put it, it took a special kind of guy to drive the thing. Chris walked behind the truck one day and in front for two days, and they never saw any snipers. But he said the driver was always stoned. I guess you’d kind of have to be.
Mom didn’t like that story, because it worried her that someone Chris might have to depend on was high. In more ways than one! So the only stories he could really tell her were about life in base camp or when they were away on a mission but weren’t fighting, and even then he could talk about only the most benign stuff. Nothing about what they did to get beer, or koon sa, and sure as hell nothing about girls.
But when she wasn’t around, or if us guys were hanging out in the backyard trying to pretend it wasn’t cold, Dad wouldn’t let him get away without at least some of the gory details. He’d ask, “How many men did you lose in that encounter?” or “How bad were that man’s wounds? Did he make it?” And always Dad wanted to know, “Did you hold?”
Did they hold the ground. Was Chris King of the Mountain. And how many friends did he lose.
One story was about when they were on their way someplace—I forget where—in this big truck. They were driving along this road that was typical, all dirt and not very wide, going through an area of rice paddies with farmers working in them. The farmers had tools and baskets and sometimes hats that they would set on the ridges between the paddies when they weren’t using them. But then about a mile farther Chris said they noticed that the tools and baskets were there, but no farmers. Chris said no one ever left things like that; tools were too scarce. So the farmers had to have left because something was very wrong.
As it turned out, the VC had mortared the area to frighten people who lived in a nearby village. Chris’s group didn’t figure this out, though, until they got to the village, where they noticed mortar holes in the ground, and there was one old man there who hadn’t fled. He told them the attack had happened about half an hour ago.
Chris said his friend Mason would sometimes point out how the spookiest part of being in a situation like that was that no one really knew what to do. The guy driving the truck didn’t know any more about what might be wrong than the guys he was driving, didn’t know what it might mean to them, or what to do about it. They had no guidance, so all they could do was look to the ranking officer and pray like hell that he had a good head on his shoulders.
My favorite stories were the ones where Chris and one or more of the other guys took care of each other. Made sure everyone was okay, that they all got out of whatever they were in. Chris told a few of these stories, and they usually included his friend Mason.
There was this one story he told Dad and me on Sunday afternoon. Mom was home putting dinner together, and the three of us drove off to this fishing spot on Parson’s Lake, where we’d go in the summer. It was too cold to sit outside, so we stayed in the car. Dad cracked his window so he could smoke his pipe, and I was in the backseat straining to watch Chris’s face while he talked. I couldn’t see much more than a silhouette, there was so much light coming through the windshield from across the water. His voice was flat, and from what I could see of his face he wasn’t allowing much expression to show there, either. He was looking almost but not quite at Dad, his gaze falling someplace off to the side of the car.
“We were away from base on a mission. It was night, and we’d made camp. There was jungle on one side of us and rice paddies on the other, and just as we were getting ready to turn in we heard the shrill sound of incoming. A whistle, then boom. And the boom was really close. But we couldn’t tell where it was coming from. So all we could do was wait. And then there was another. It landed just past the edge of our camp. This time we could tell it came from the direction of the rice paddies, so we grabbed what we could and headed for the jungle.
“We hadn’t come this way, we’d come up the road, so we had no idea how bad this section of jungle would be. Booby traps, mines, that kind of thing. It’s hard enough to watch for trip wires even in the daylight. And from the sounds around us, I could tell some of our guys were setting off traps. There’s booms and screams and shouts, the place is a hellhole. We figured out later, those who survived, that the VC must have set