Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her enough had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Wolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself.
The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood hat Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin. The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.
Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Cool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man’s habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake.
Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he’d stolen on R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizer until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than She in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots-?2. 1 pounds-?and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dry.
School’s foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the ROOT, carried condoms. Norman Booker carried a diary. Rat Killed carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet.
Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6. 7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large empress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent.
With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the payday, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away. They were called legs or grunts. To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross impede his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.
Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of Martha. The first was a Coddler snapshot signed Love, though he knew better. She stood against a brick wall. Her eyes were gray and neutral, her lips slightly open as she stared straight-on at the camera. At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he Ovid her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picture-taker spreading out against the brick wall.
The second photograph had been clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook. It was an action shot-?women’s volleyball-?and Martha was bent horizontal to the floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore white gym shorts. Her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair, the left knee cocked and carrying her entire weight, which was just over 1 00 pounds. Lieutenant Cross remembered touching that left knee.
A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee beneath it and the sound of the gunfire that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing her good night at the dorm door. Right then, he thought, he should’ve done something brave.
He should ;eve carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He should’ve risked it. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new things he should’ve done. What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty. As first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a . 45-caliber pistol that weighed 2. 9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men.
As an R TO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRE-25 radio, a killer, 26 mounds with its battery. As a medic, Rat Killed carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&M’s for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds. As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded. In addition, Dobbins carried between 10 and 15 pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders.
As PECS or Spec as, most of them were common grunts ND carried the standard M-1 6 gas-operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7. 5 pounds unloaded, 8. 2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoleers, adding on another 8. 4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at maximum. When it was available, they also carried M-16 maintenance gear-?rods and steel brushes and swabs and tubes of L AS oil-?all of which weighed about a pound.
Among the grunts, some carried the M-79 grenade launcher, 5. 9 pounds unloaded, a reasonably light weapon except for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round weighed 10 ounces. The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than She, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizer and all the rest, plus the unwished fear. He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping.
Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-?just boom, then down-?not like the ivies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle-?not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-buck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself. They stripped off Lavender’s canteens and ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat Killed said the obvious, the guy’s dead, and Mitchell Sanders used his radio to report one U.
S. AKA and to request a chopper. Then they wrapped Lavender in his poncho. They carried him out to a dry payday, established security, and sat smoking the dead man’s dope until the chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to himself. He pictured Marsh’s smooth young face, thinking he loved her more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about her. When the distaff arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward they burned Than She.
They marched until dusk, then dug their holes, and that night Kiowa kept explaining how you had to be there, how fast it was, how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete. Boom-down, he said. Like cement. In addition to the three standard weapons-?the M-60, VI-1 6, and M-79-?they aired whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-catch-can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-ass and CAR-ass and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-ass and Chi-Comes and RPG and Simenon carbines and black market Uzis and . 8-caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWS and shotguns and silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee Struck carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his rangefinder’s feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore antipersonnel mine-?3. 5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades-?14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade-?24 ounces. Some carried CSS or tear gas grenades. Some carried white phosphorus grenades.
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power Of the things they carried. In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble, an ounce at cost. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky white color with flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.
It was this separate-but-together quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare feet.
Martha was a poet, with the poet’s sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving long the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. He loved her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salt and moisture.
His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore, with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness. What they carried varied by mission. When a mission took them to the mountains, they carried mosquito netting, machetes, canvas tarps, and extra bug juice.
If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily mined Ass, where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a 28- pound mine detector. With its headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety.
On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in carotene. Lee Struck carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would never be a problem. Rat Killed carried brandy and M&M’s candy. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6. 3 pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried is girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all carried ghosts.
When dark came, they would move out single file across the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night waiting. Other missions were more complicated and required special equipment. In mid- April, it was their mission to search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than She area south of Chug Alai- To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of penetrate high explosives, four blocks to a man, 68 pounds in all. They carried wiring, detonators, and battery-powered slackers.
Dave Jensen carried earplugs. Most often, before blowing the tunnels, they were ordered by higher command to search them, which was considered bad news, but by and large they just shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a big man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel duty. The others would draw numbers. Before Lavender died there were 17 men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and crawl in headfirst with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross’s . 45-scabbier pistol. The rest of them would fan out as security.
They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there-?the tunnel walls squeezing in-?how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in-?ass and elbows-?a swallowed-up feeling-?and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it?
Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer. On April 16, when Lee Struck drew the number 17, he laughed and muttered something and Went down quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel opening, then out across a dry payday toward the village of Than She. Nothing moved. No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank Cool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Struck but also feeling the luck of the draw.
You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders, and onetime you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line and no one laughed. Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to Pee. After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel, leaned down, and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought-?a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love.
Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Struck and the war, all the angers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone-?riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria-?even dancing, she danced alone-?and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening.
How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed ere, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin’s eyes, just flat and uninvolved. Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old.
He couldn’t help it. A few moments later Lee Struck crawled out of the tunnel. He came up grinning filthy but alive. Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped Struck on the back and made jokes about rising from the dead. Worms, Rat Killed said. Right out of the grave. Bucking’ zombie. The men laughed. They all felt great relief. Spook city, said Mitchell Sanders. Lee Struck made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy, and right then, when Struck made that high happy moaning sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing.
He lay with his mouth open. The teeth were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye. The cheekbone was gone. Oh chit, Rat Killed said, the guy’s dead. The guy’s dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound-?the guy’s dead. I mean really. The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit’s foot. Norman Booker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders.
The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed 4 ounces at most. It had been cut room a PVC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They’d found him at the bottom of an irrigation ditch, badly burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy wore black shorts and sandals. At the time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition. You want my opinion, Mitchell Sanders said, there’s a definite moral here. He put his hand on the dead boy’s wrist.
He was quiet for a time, as if counting a pulse, then he patted the stomach, almost affectionately, and used Kiosk’s hunting hatchet to remove the thumb. Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was. Moral? You know. Moral. Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to Norman Booker. There was no blood. Smiling, he kicked the boy’s head, watched the flies scatter, and said, It’s like with that old TV show-?Paladin. Have gun, will travel. Henry Dobbins thought about it. Yeah, well, he finally said. I don’t see no moral. There it Is, man. Buck off. They carried US stationery and pencils and pens.
They carried Sterne, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools Of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease incises, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail clippers, Sys Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the resurvey choppers came in, they carried hot chow in green merits cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a 2- gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special occasions.
Henry Dobbins carried Black Hag insecticide. Dave Jensen carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Struck carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRE-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese- English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.
They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and payday algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself-?Vietnam, the place, the soil-?a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost.
They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, impel grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind Of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility.
Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the illegal without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.
They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their
Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resurvey choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters-?the resources were stunning-?sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter-?it was the great American war chest-?the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat-?they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and holders-?and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry. After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led his men into the village of Than She. They burned everything.
They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours through the hot afternoon, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling. He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed 5 pounds, he began digging a hole in the earth. He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war. All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax, slashing, feeling both love and hate, and then later, when it was full dark, he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while.
In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she longed to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would. Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I swear to God-?boom, down. Not a word. I’ve heard this, said Norman Booker. A pissers, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping. All right, fine. That’s enough. Yeah, but you had to see it, the guy just-? I heard, man. Cement. So why not shut the buck up? Kiowa shook his head sadly and glanced over at the hole where Lieutenant Jimmy Cross sat watching the night. The air was thick and wet.
A warm dense fog had settled over the paddies and there was the stillness that precedes rain. After a time Kiowa sighed. One thing for sure, he said. The lieutenant’s in some deep hurt. Mean that crying jag-?the way he was carrying on-?it wasn’t fake or anything it was real heavy-duty hurt. The man cares. Sure, Norman Booker said. Say what you want, the man does care. We all got problems. Not Lavender. No, I guess not, Booker said. Do me a favor, though. Shut up? That’s a smart Indian. Shut up. Shrugging, Kiowa pulled off his boots. He wanted to say more, just to lighten p his sleep, but instead he opened his New Testament and arranged it beneath his head as a pillow.
The fog made things seem hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but then he was thinking how fast it was, no drama, down and dead, and how it was hard to feel anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion wasn’t there and he couldn’t make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be alive. He liked the smell of the New Testament under his cheek, the leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the chemicals were. He liked hearing the sounds of night. Even his fatigue, it felt fine, the stiff muscles and the prickly awareness of his own body, a floating feeling.
He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man’s pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night. After a moment Norman Booker sat up in the dark. What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell it to me. Forget it. No, man, go on. One thing hate, it’s a silent Indian. For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity.
