by Arthur Goldhammer

"What do you think, Krefeld? About that guy?"

"What do you mean, what do I think? What guy?"

"Give me a break, Krefeld. The guy. The magazine guy. The one you were just talking to. What do you think?"

"Aw, that guy? I don't know. He just asked a lot of dumb questions. The usual. You know, they put on some tiger fatigues and a steel pot and act either like they seen it all before or they never seen nothing."

"What'd he want to know about?"

"Hearts and minds."

"Say again."

"The dinks, asshole. Their hearts and minds. You know, are we winning them or what? The grunt's point of view."

"So what'd you tell him?"

"I told him I don't speak gook. I told him every zipperhead I see is smiling, so it looks good to me."

Krefeld emulates the ubiquitous oriental smile. Kerry, his buddy, lying on his back on red earth so fine it infiltrates every pore, shades his eyes to watch. His head is propped up on a steel pot covered with camouflage netting. He still has his web gear on. Six antipersonnel grenades hang like fruit from his suspenders and shake when he laughs. Three days and nights on long-range patrol have left him dog tired. He wants to sleep for the next three days. But the First Cav has moved in to the firebase while the patrol was out. The Cav is taking over. The hooch Kerry and Krefeld have shared for two months has been assigned to three FNGs, two blacks and a white. So Kerry has no bed to lie down on. The lieutenant is looking into it. Meanwhile Kerry is hungry for something other than C's, but the battalion mess is gone, there's nobody to cadge an early handout from. The lieutenant is looking into that too. In the Army without somebody to look after you you're nothing.

Kerry's eyes close and for a blissful moment sleep holds him in her arms. The next thing he knows he's scrambling to his feet amid a clatter of clanging metal. Something about the way Krefeld yells "Ten-hut!" tells him he isn't bullshitting, and a lucky thing. On his feet Kerry finds himself face to face with a bird colonel. His salute, though less than crisp, is enough to get by. The colonel's silvered sunshades hide his eyes. Under his nose, though, smack dab in the little crater a teacher of Kerry's once called "God's thumbprint," is a dot of fresh blood, where the officer has nicked himself shaving. Middle of the afternoon at the nose of the Parrot's Beak and this guy is ready for g&t's with fucking General Abrams on the verandah of the Continental Palace. His pores are clean. He smells clean. He comes at Kerry's face chin first, barking and jabbing. Fucking officers, Kerry thinks, have a way of getting up close, crossing the line that usually divides man from man. That they could do this with impunity used to tick him off. Lots of things about about the Army used to tick him off. No more. Nothing bothers him now. Kerry is on autopilot. Seven weeks to go. Trying to keep his nose clean. Stay out of trouble until DEROS, 19 September 1969.

Sensing he'll get nowhere with Kerry, the colonel turns aside to question Krefeld. "What'd that magazine fellow want to know?"

Kerry can't entirely suppress a laugh.

"Something funny about that question, soldier?"

"No, sir, nothing funny, just that I just finished asking him the same thing."

"Is that right? And what did you find out?"

"Hearts and minds, sir."

"What's that?"

"Guy wanted to know if we was winning their hearts and minds."

"And what did your buddy tell him?"

"I told him I don't speak gook, sir."

"Vietnamese, son, Vietnamese. I don't want to hear that other word, understand? It shows a lack of respect, that word. It shows you've forgotten what we're here for, son. We got to show these people respect. Build up their confidence. They can win this war. We can't win it for 'em. They've got to do it themselves."

"Yes, sir."

"Because we are winning their hearts and minds, son. Don't you forget it. Every day we're winning their hearts and minds. And we do it by showing them respect."

"Yes, sir."

"That magazine guy tries to talk to you again, you tell him that. Then you send him to see me. That clear?"

"Yes, sir."

The Army, Kerry thinks, is like the Church. Having your ass chewed by a colonel who doesn't know you from Adam's off ox counts about as much as being told by the Pope to mend your sinful ways. Now the lieutenant, the lieutenant is more like the parish priest who hears your weekly confession. He knows what kind of sinner you are. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. How many times? Where? In what way? When did you last confess? Kerry had thought about becoming a priest once, had even started the seminary, but it hadn't worked out. He pulls out his wallet to look at the picture of Kathleen, but it isn't there. He forgot he'd taken it out before going out on patrol. In case he got shot he didn't want some buck-tooth gook jacking off over a picture of his girl in a two-piece. Now his stuff had been shipped off to Long Binh while he was out pounding the boonies, Kathleen's picture with all the rest: clean underwear, stash of smoke, two decks of cards, a stick of kielbasa his aunt had sent him, God knows why. It was gonna be a long night and they said no moon, could be trouble. The Cav was on Condition Red—but the Cav was always on Condition Red. Damn the luck. When you're short, screw-ups happen. Fact is, screw-ups are always happening, but when you're short they work on your mind.

As the sun sets Kerry knows he ought to feel his stomach tightening, but by now the lieutenant's found him a bed for the night, he's had a nap and a shower, and so feels like a million bucks instead of a man in an outpost surrounded by a jungle full of unfriendlies. Sauntering along the perimeter wire, he and Krefeld pause now and then to contemplate the sweaty grunts stuck with the ticklish business of setting the night's Claymores. "Hey, you REMFs know which way to point them things, don't you?" Kreef calls out.

"Sure they know, Kreef, it's written right on 'em: This Side Toward Enemy. You know where the enemy is, you guys? Out there." With his right hand Kerry points toward the distant tree line, a dark fringe hanging from the now gilded sky. Then he slowly sweeps the horizon from right to left through a full 360 degrees. Like toads in the dust the men fuss with their detonator wire; Kerry and Krefeld move on.

Out of a sandbag bunker built into the firebase perimeter comes a voice: "Hey, you guys, in here."

They duck in. It's the magazine guy.

"Hey, if it ain't Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper."

"At your service."

"Well, you know, like, Clark, this is the Army, man, we got to follow orders. So negatory on meeting you in a bunker, Chief. The brass don't like the troops holing up in what they call the defensive perimeter. Or didn't you know that?"

"Well, tell the truth, men, I just came out from Saigon a couple of days ago. Sick of that JUSPAO handout shit. Pubic Affairs, if you know what I mean." The reporter cups his genitals in his two hands and heaves to underscore his meaning. The two soldiers exchange a glance. "So, like, where can we go and, you know, talk? Someplace private."

"Hey, we already got our asses chewed for talking to you, man."

"Yeah, I heard. But look, fellas, one good turn deserves another, right? I got some stuff you might like."

"Stuff?"

"Smoke."

"You CID, man?"

"Aw, come on, guys, I may have been in Saigon, but I've been in-country awhile, you can't tell me there's no place on this fucking firebase where a man can't go for a nice quiet smoke."

"Used to be. Who knows now that the Cav's took over?"

"Show me where used to be is."

"Sho' nuff, stranger. What you got, anyway?"

"Saigon Red. Sweet stuff. Pure Highland weed."

"What do you say, Ker? We deserve a night of sweet dreams after three days with the mud and the bugs."

"What the hell."

In a little hollow below the CP is this hooch marked Infirmary. Below that is a sign that reads "Chicago, USA, Richard J. Daley, Mayor, 12,762 mi." and an arrow pointing vaguely skyward. Dark green blackout shades are drawn. Nobody home. "Doc had himself Medevacked out last week. Nice of him to leave the furniture. Lieutenant says this is our hooch until tomorrow A.M."

Kerry and Krefeld stretch out on the green canvas cots while Clark Kent sits on the floor rolling a joint. He rolls it fat, sort of bugle-like, tapering to a thin mouthpiece that he licks shut. "I'm gonna level with you guys," he says. "I'm tired of reporting the war on a one-damn-thing-after-another basis. I want to get closer to the heart of things."

"Oh, yeah? Where's that?"

"I don't know. That's what I want you to tell me." He pauses for effect and smiles a big smile.

"I come from there," Krefeld says. "'Heartland of America.' Says so right on the sign. 'Entering Hyattsville, Ohio, pop. 10,807, Heartland of America.'"

The reporter is writing now, and Krefeld—Kerry can hear it in the way his voice rises in pitch—is making Hyattsville out to be the place he wants to go home to, the World. Making it out or making it up: Kerry was never quite sure which. Krefeld is a natural when it comes to telling stories. Kerry's been listening to his stories for close on a year. Kreef always said, "Somebody ought to put my stories in the paper. I'd be famous." Now he's got this guy from Time eating out of his hand. Combat reporter type. Young, but not as young as the grunts. Good condition, but slightly bloodshot in the eyes. Hair too long for the military. The slight puffiness of the flesh under the eyes and around the backs of the cheeks hints at a self-indulgence that the years will only compound. The journalist has picked up the grunt vocabulary—a kind of protective coloration—but his sentences are too fine: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Somewhere—reporter school?—they taught him to keep his opinions to himself. He has this way of seeming to level with you—it's in the eyes, the voice—but nothing really gets said on his side. He waits for you to fill in his blanks. He doesn't break eye contact as long as you're talking. He scribbles when it's his turn, as though his mouth, his mind, and his hands are independent. He invites Krefeld to tell him about home, and Kreef obliges, Kreef wants to make him feel the perfection of Hyattsville, of the good life he has sacrificed for the privations and terrors of combat because his country asked it of him. Kerry knows this side of Krefeld well. The patriot side, the Kreef who likes to say, "Beats me what the fuck we're doing in Nam, but as long as we're here I'm glad I'm part of it, Ker, ain't you?" Doing his duty makes Kreef feel good. So dutifully, instinctively, he plays up Hyattsville—in Arcadia ego—to drive home the magnitude of his renunciation.

After thirteen months in Krefeld's company Kerry feels he was himself born and bred in Ohio although in truth he had never set foot west of Springfield, Mass., until the Army in its wisdom saw fit to send him to Fort Lewis, Washington, for eight wet weeks of AIT ("The jungle will feel warm and dry after this," the wise old sergeant had opined, owl-like, from under the dripping pediment of his poncho) and then to Oakland where prior to reporting to the Depot for shipment to Vietnam he and his now good-buddy Kreef (who had shared his leaking tent at Lewis) had enjoyed a night of pre-carnage debauch. "We who are about to die salute you." This was a sentence Kerry once, in his seminary days, had been able to translate into Latin. Roman soldiers had uttered it two thousand years ago. He felt an affinity with them, with all the males of the human race who had ever faced the ordeal, the testing unknown, of battle. His bowels meanwhile tingled from the two malaria pills they told him to take the night before reporting to Oakland: a little white one and a big orange one. "The orange one makes you shit like a horse," the owlish old sergeant had said. "Big wet plops drop right out your asshole, you don't even know they comin'." The wisdom of hazarding a night on the town in this condition seemed dubious to the cautious Kerry, but Krefeld's breast pocket was burning with an address. An old buddy back in Hyattsville who'd been to Nam and back ("It ain't as bad as they say—it's worse") had written it down on a piece of paper: "Best whorehouse in Oakland." Krefeld had insisted. "We deserve that much, our last night in the Free World." It meant so much to him, that last shot at what he had already, even before leaving home, learned to call round-eye (as opposed to "slant-eye") pussy, as if all that mattered in a woman was her sex and her nationality, and as it happened that night in Oakland Krefeld's had turned out to be round-eyed all right, and American. African-American anyway, a first for Krefeld that he liked in his own way to recall: "Remember that night in Oakland? Damn, if I could only get me a dink as sweet as that spade girl." Kerry squirmed. He'd been brought up to call Negroes "colored" and remembered his mother's stern reprimand when he'd once referred to Joanna who cleaned the house as "black." Gook didn't bother him, though. You had to have a word like gook for the enemy, otherwise he might start to seem human. As for that night in Oakland, Kerry had gone upstairs with a girl and paid her fifty dollars he'd rather have spent on something nice for his mom or Kathleen; then he didn't do anything with her. That was OK, she said, but did he mind if she slept, and could he wake her in half an hour? Guys did this all the time, the girl told him, it was no skin off her nose. He thanked her for this knowledge, for which he felt indeed grateful. Then Krefeld came down and borrowed a hundred for another half-hour, this time with two girls, the second one a Mexican with a rose in her hair and a scar on her neck that ran from one ear to somewhere under her chin. While Kerry took off his shoe to get the money (Kreef had told him to carry it there to keep from getting rolled), Krefeld put on a show for the girls in the parlor, stripping off his shirt to show off his biceps and pecs and threatening to pull down his pants and show off the rest of his manhood until the madam came, a wizened old black woman with a broom, and chased him upstairs saying she ran a respectable house and didn't want "no military riff-raff bustin' things up." Kerry sat then and played cards with his girl downstairs: a half-hour of gin rummy cost him another ten bucks, and when Kreef finally came down, boisterous and exuberant, Kerry was cursing himself for hooking up with such a jerk. But Krefeld was all right. He just had a loud way of demonstrating his wariness of the unknown.

The infirmary hooch is full of marijuana smoke by now. The joint's been going around the table for five minutes or so, and the dope's just beginning to hit Kerry's brain. Kreef's into a story about the big old clearing off Route 38 just south of Hyattsville where everybody from town went parking. A Dairy Queen had been supposed to go in there, but the owner had run out of money or something after bulldozing the property, so there was this nice convenient lot on a sort of flat rise overlooking the town, such as it was—a skyline consisting of a powerplant smokestack, an insurance company downtown, and a couple of radio antennas with lights flickering along their length. The little burg kind of nestled in a bend in the river "like a girl in the crook of your arm," Krefeld once described it, and Kerry, a city boy who rarely saw the river that washed the shores of his native Charlestown a few blocks from where he grew up playing street hockey and pitching pennies against cement stoops, thought this sounded like poetry and began thinking what kind of poetry somebody could write about where he came from, but all he came up with was the bridge over the Mystic River that you could see from the schoolyard playground, a big, green hulk of graceless steel hanging from suspension cables that Kerry thought were like angels' wings, though he would never say this to Krefeld because he thought a "girl in the crook of your arm" is the kind of poetry a man can admit to while "angels' wings" is priestly stuff and Kreef already gave him enough grief about his brush with the priesthood. "I don't see how a man can do it. Go all his life without fucking. I mean one way or another it's gonna come out of you, right. You jack off or you have wet dreams, you know what I'm saying? So where's the purity in that?" Long nights on guard duty you get to talking about this kind of thing. You get to thinking maybe even the pathetic few blinking lights on Hyattsville's radio antennas are something special compared with the black emptiness of Asia. "Where are all them billions of little yellow people supposed to live over here?" Krefeld asks him one night out of the blue, after a couple of hours of listening for some quickening of the silence to betray the presence of an enemy. "Nothing but one goddamn black hole if you ask me." What could you do then but check the belt on the M60 one more time?

There's a little Lao heroin mixed in with the Highlands marijuana, a blend perfected by the Aussie Rangers that packs an unsuspected wallop—the journalist is so green he doesn't even know what he's carrying—and the smoke by now has got all three men good and high, so that they can practically taste that vacant lot off Route 38 south of Hyattsville where the Dairy Queen was supposed to go but didn't and where kids went to neck, or did until the girl died there. It was out of town so the city police didn't bother you and the sheriff didn't have but two cars to cover the entire county so there wasn't much to worry about on that score, either, though once two deputies did come by looking to catch a little flash of titty or something and damned if one of them didn't shine his two-foot-long flashlight through the back window on his own goddamn daughter going at it with a buddy of Krefeld's in the back seat. Well, you could just imagine what hell broke loose that night, but that was the exception, and in any case that isn't the story Krefeld has picked out to tell the reporter tonight. "You ain't gonna tell him about the dead girl, are you Kreef?" Kerry asks.

"The dead girl?" The reporter scribbles away in his notebook as fast as he can. Kerry smiles.

"Yeah, well, I was gettin' there, all right? You want to tell it?"

"No, man, it's your story. You go right ahead."

Kerry has heard a couple of versions of the Dead Girl story. He likes them all. Whether it was Krefeld's skill as a storyteller or the power of loneliness, fatigue, fear, and dope to focus the mind didn't matter. Kerry, always a quiet, self-contained boy, was a rapt listener. The Dead Girl went basically like this: In Hyattsville there was this beautiful hippie, see. Kreef, who never lost sight of his listeners' reactions, noted the journalist's skeptical furrowing of his brow. "Where did you go to college, Clark Kent? Berkeley? You probaby think all the hippies is in Haight-Ashbury or something. You probably think you laid 'em all, right? Well, back home in Hyattsville we had our own homegrown hippie. Diana Moore was her name."

Diana Moore (Krefeld recited, and his voice took on a soothing musical lilt as he got into the rhythm of his tale) was a remarkably tall girl with a dancer's grace that made her seem to weigh even less than she did. Her auburn hair hung to her waist in the rare moments that found her still, but more often it trailed behind her when she ran or flew like a banner when she rode in the MG roadster that was but one mark of her difference from her fellow Hyattsvillians. Her people were different, too: Professor Moore taught archaeology at OSU and was said to keep, in a locked portion of his basement, a priceless collection of ancient instruments of torture; Mrs. Moore, who practiced law and claimed kinship with Abe Lincoln and was a Republican committeewoman, had nevertheless acquired a reputation as a radical by inviting an associate of Martin Luther King's to address the League of Women Voters. The Moores saw little of people in Hyattsville. Their socializing, people figured, was more with folks around the university and the state capital. But Diana until she was fourteen had attended the regular Hyattsville schools: "Same as me," Krefeld said. "We all drooled after her. I mean, she was something, even as a little kid. Like Shirley Temple or something. I mean, the kind of girl you only see in the movies." Then, suddenly, she disappeared from school, from one day to the next. It took a while for the rumors to start. Some said she had gone crazy and been packed off to a loony bin, others that she had run wild and been packed off to a finishing school. But since no one really knew her, she was quickly forgotten until that summer, the summer of '68, when just as suddenly as she had disappeared she turned up again, in her eighteenth year, at a folding card table on the street in front of the post office and flanked by two strange freaks, boys with golden hair even longer than hers and falling over denim coveralls worn shirtless and patched here and there with pieces of red bandana alive with spidery designs. There were peace emblems all over the table and around their necks, and the three of them sat there all day in front of the post office having a ball, yukking it up and greeting the scowls and grimaces they more often than not received from Hyattsville's postal patrons with weird, creepy smiles as if high on something, or so everybody speculated. That Arab had just shot Bobby Kennedy, and Hyattsville was in no mood for such tomfoolery, even if it was Prof. and Mrs. Moore's daughter, so the mayor told the police chief to put an end to it and the police chief did, after reading through an electronic bullhorn some ordinance about interfering with access to a public building, thereby drawing a nice crowd of law-observant citizens to witness the bodily hauling off of the two angelic boys attending the local Shirley Temple, who squirmed so much in her ankle-length skirt of wrap-around madras that the couple of safety-pins that held the whole lashup together came loose and the officers had to fish in the back of the cruiser for a blanket to throw over her to keep things decent. All the while the three protesters are shouting "Fascists! Pigs! Fascist pigs! Off the fascist pigs!," so when an errant cowboy boot strikes one of the cops in the groin, they jump at the chance to up the charges to "assault with a deadly weapon (shod foot)," news of which brings Mrs. Moore racing back from Columbus in that humongous Lincoln of hers to post bail and start hurling habeas corpuses every which way. Hippie or no hippie, the girl is her own flesh and blood.

Family means a lot to Krefeld. He's always talking about his old man, his war against the Japs, his Silver Star from Okinawa. "He don't talk about that shit, though. My Dad says guys who talk about what they did in the war probably didn't do it." Sometimes, though, in a dark basement after a tough boiler replacement, an old war story, usually with a point to make about some human foible, would pop out of him, irrepressible. "My Dad's a great storyteller," Kreef has assured Kerry. "Better'n me." At such times Kerry thinks what a privilege it is to have a dad to take you into his oil business and show you the ropes, get you started in life. "Naw, you don't understand," Kreef sets him straight. "I ain't going into the business, I just worked for him summers. Shit, you see me staying on in Hyattsville, man? After Nam? The shit I've seen? Come on."

On the very night of Diana's arrest the youth of Hyattsville assemble as usual on the dirt strip along Route 38 south of town. The moon hangs low and huge in the sky, as if in warning. The air smells of aftershave and roll-on and pommade and hair spray and half the perfumes from the front counter of Belk's downtown. All the cars are abuzz with talk of the arrest. The girls condemn Diana Moore for being "stuck-up" and "a weird dresser" and "using no make-up." (This, the critic in Kerry thinks, Kreef is making up: he doesn't have a clue what the girls were thinking.) Collectively the boys nod in agreement, but secretly each one thinks that she is wild and spirited and free and that he is the one to tame her. (Kerry thinks the truth must be that this Diana Moore wouldn't give Kreef a look. Nothing Kreef can't stand like a girl who won't give him a look. Kreef is vain, thinks he's got a body like a god.) And then, miraculously, Diana appears, there where, virginal when she left town, she has never before been seen, standing on a boulder at the edge of the precipice in the very hollow of the river's curve, silhouetted against the low, monitory moon.

The two blonde boys are with her, too, but much lower down, for the boulder lifts her up and their feet are planted somewhat downslope of where the ridge crests before falling sharply away to the bed of the river some forty feet below. The boy hippies are shouting something that at first the lovers in their cars have to strain to hear, but it sounds as though they are offering a kiss from Diana to any man who will burn—precisely what is to be burned they can't quite comprehend at first. In car after car the radio is snapped off so the boy can hear what Diana's companions are saying, and inevitably the girls hear too, as the voice of Elvis fades, as the Temptations are silenced, as the Beatles' harmony is abruptly terminated. The words become clear. Diana is offering her kiss, and like a mime performing on a stage she puckers in profile before the looming moon and kisses the air first to the east, then to the west. Up and down the lot car doors open with muffled metallic thwacks and couples stumble out, and in the still night above the rushing river they can hear clearly what they are being asked to sacrifice: their draft cards. Burn "the instruments of oppression of a fascist state" and Diana will kiss you, promise her lithe angelic vestals, their thin torsos swaying like reeds as they bellow into the night. Strangely, the girls from the cars now cluster in twos and threes, whispering excitedly, while the men, some at a trot, some straggling slowly, come together in one group from which twenty pairs of eyes stare in hungry bewilderment at the peculiar ritual being enacted above them by the two blonde boys, who, bending and turning, bending and turning, gradually build two small mounds of dry twigs which now one of them sets afire with a yellow pocket Bic, while above them on the boulder the auburn-haired beauty performs a kind of dance, letting her arms rise sinuously with the curling smoke from the bonfires as it spirals upward.

Now the mood of the milling crowd of boys below turns ugly, for although all burn to kiss Diana none will abase himself for such reward. Still, they direct their anger initially not at her, for her beauty daunts them, but at her companions, men who in her shadow become objects of fear and loathing: "Faggots! Queers!" someone in the crowd shouts, and the taunt is taken up by the others. One person throws a stone, then another. Diana, misjudging the situation, perhaps, or possibly having planned to all along, suddenly snatches away the long wrap-around skirt that hides the lower part of her body, slips out of her halter-top, and does a sort of entrechat toward the mob, joyfully clapping her heels together as she leaps to a point just ten yards in front of the closest youth, a barrel-chested footballer who is stopped in his tracks by this unprecedented apparition of nakedness. Staring directly into his eyes, she taunts: "Burn your draft card and have all of me," before turning on one heel and bounding off once more toward the boulder. For an instant the footballer stands there, his chest heaving underneath the legend on the tattered workout shirt that reads "Property of Hyattsville High Athletic Dept." Then, reacting as if stung, he races after the girl, whose tall slender body, having leapt as if weightless from the space between the blazing bonfires onto the jutting boulder where she had stood, continues its arc on into space, into the embrace of the waiting moon, which, with sublime indifference, drops her into the river below.

"My God," the scribbling reporter gasps. "You mean she killed herself just like that? Threw herself off the rocks?" That, Krefeld conceded, no one could say. Momentum might have overcome intention. Perhaps she had miscalculated; perhaps she had slipped; perhaps the adrenal rush of fear had put greater spring in her step than she imagined. In any case she was dead, all twenty pairs of wide male eyes could see that as they peered over the precipice into the moonlit river that held the heart of America in the crook of its arm. Drugs, was what the cops said it was: "Girl's Drowning Called Drug-Related," the Hyattsville Times-Clarion reported.

"You believe that, Kreef?"

"Me? Naw. I talked to the guy who went after her. I go, 'Like, Jesus, did you see that? and he goes, 'Yeah, I saw it but I don't believe it. She fuckin' jumped, man.' And so I go, 'Hey, what did you say to her man?' and he goes, 'Hey, what do you think, I didn't say nothing, I just looked at her.'" And Kerry thinks: What she saw drove her to despair. And the reporter thinks: "Can I sell this? Can I believe this guy? 'The dying,' I'll call it, 'look upon the dead.' Or tell it from the girl's POV, maybe. Beauty confronts the beast." Krefeld meanwhile has tears in his eye. And Kerry thinks, I know Krefeld, he wouldn't weep unless it happened, something like it anyway, some girl he wanted and couldn't have because somehow she died. Not much reduced Krefeld to tears but death and his old man's drinking. But the Time reporter doesn't know him well enough even to sense the tears. He thinks he's got to do something to keep control of the interview. Reaching deep into the war correspondent's bag of tricks, "Got a girl back home, Krefeld?" is all he manages to come up with.

"Sure," Kreef says, and next thing you know he has his wallet out and he's showing around pictures of Charlotte in her prom dress, Charlotte in gold and blue taffeta with a big knot in the small of her back, sort of Japanese-like, but a plain old midwestern face, kind of squarish, with short blonde hair cut to emphasize the squarishness and a nice, squat nose, and lips a little jarring as photographed, redder than they ought to have been and rather too thick and wide. That was his girl, and yes, he was going to marry her, they'd gotten engaged on the night before he flew to Oakland. This also happened outside Hyattsville, but north of town, where Route 38 meets the Interstate, where the Marriott went up, yet not quite far enough out of town for Charlotte to feel comfortable with the hasty prenuptial consummation that Krefeld's shipment order imposed. But Kreef told her she wouldn't have to show her face in the lobby, he'd get the key and there was a side entrance by the dining room, which there was. He had his diamond in his pocket (for which he had borrowed $100 from his father and $100 from his baseball teammates) and slipped it on her finger the minute they were inside the room; she said it was everything she'd ever dreamed of. She wrote every day; Kreef replied once a week when he found the time. The reporter asks if he dreams about her. He says of course, but Kerry wonders if maybe all the other women didn't crowd her a little in his buddy's mind.

Anyway, Kreef has the idea that reporters get around, that this guy has maybe seen things he, Krefeld, hasn't yet begun to suspect, and he figures the way to draw him out about this is to talk about war's wonderful bounty: "I mean, don't nobody tell you this before you go in, maybe it was different in my old man's time, but hey, if you got to have a war, like I'm always telling the padre here—Kerry's half a priest, you know, he tell you that yet? Been to the seminary and everything—like I'm always telling the padre, you got to have a war, it's nice they throw in all them girls to make it easier, you know what I mean? Charlotte? Shit, no, what she don't know won't hurt her. Thank God for penicillin. Yeah, I had the clap twice since I been here, but the sawbones fixed me up. So what about you press guys? What do you do for nookie? You must have some special places up in Saigon, right? How about inviting us warriors next time we're up in town?"

The reporter just smiles. Professional deadpan. You didn't know what he was thinking. Kerry for some reason is thinking of this tea girl in Saigon. She has stick-figure skinny thighs a lot like his Kathleen's but wears a plastic miniskirt the color of a kid's rain slicker. Her canteloupe bosoms are slung in black lace from sun-peeled shoulders They're not from the same body as the legs. It's like she ordered them from a girlie magazine: send me a pair of 36D's. Kathleen's chest was flat, boyish, freckled. The feel of it had changed Kerry's life—he couldn't go on with the priesthood after she'd opened her blouse to him. If God will let him live he will settle down with her and have kids and bring them up Catholic and be a good father, not run off the way his father had done after the Korean War. Kerry wonders if his father might have been a little like Krefeld: a man with a lot of stories to tell, a man who couldn't find peace at home with a quiet woman whose kisses were dry and who said her rosary mornings and evenings. Seeing Kreef in the photograph with Charlotte made him think of the old black-and-white snapshot of his mother in a pinafore with a white collar and his father, skinnier than Krefeld but just as hairy-chested, in a bathing suit on Revere Beach: it must have been 1953. His father had his arm around his mother's waist pulling her toward him. Somehow the photo made you sense a resistance in her, a demurring curvature of her spine. He'd seen Kreef strike a similar pose with a bargirl at Mustang Sally's in Saigon; she resisted his pull because Sally's was the soul brothers' bar, a place where all the records on the jukebox were Motown, Memphis, or R&B. "No, no, GI, you go across street to Lucky Lady, you be better there," the girl told Kreef, trying to head off a fight with one of her black regulars. Kerry managed to get Kreef out before there was trouble. "Damn, you, Ker, you gonna let a zip throw me over for a nigger? What kind of man are you, anyway?" Suddenly Kerry remembers why his mom didn't like him calling Joanna black: "Your father referred to colored people as 'niggers,' Daniel. It's an ugly word I never want to hear from your mouth. Use it and I'll wash your mouth out with soap."

Looking over, Kerry sees Kreef sucking on the last of the roach and looking damned pleased with himself. "You know, Ker, this dude here could make us famous. He could write us up in his magazine. We could be the Unknown Soldiers, man. Our boys in hot damn Vietnam. What do you think, Ker? You ready for fame?"

"Ready as I'll ever be."

"You gonna make me famous now, Clark, you remember that. Famous but don't get me in trouble or nothing. Don't you go writing any shit about me and the cathouses of Saigon. I got a fiancée back home."

"Keep your shirt on, troop. I don't stab people in the back. All right if I look you up in a couple of weeks for a follow?"

"Sure, man, whatever. Just bring some more of this nice, mellow dope with you."

Kreef and Kerry sleep that night in the infirmary hooch. The night, though moonless, passes without incident. Without anyone to wake them they sleep like babies long into the morning, when an explosion sets the hooch walls rattling and sends the zillion bugs that had been warming themselves under the blackout shades swarming in a great buzz and flutter of wings. The men throw on steel pots and flak vests and come flying out of the hooch M16s in hand to see what's up. Broad daylight smacks them hard between the eyes.

"Since when do the fucking Cong do daylight jobs?"

"You a LRRP or something, man?" this Cav guy pipes up, probably a clerk. "You been out in the sun too long. The Cong's in their holes as usual. It was the battalion chopper just went down."

Kerry looks out beyond the wire toward the tree line, toward Cambodia, toward the Parrot's Beak through which the wily, elusive, infuriating, jeering enemy supposedly funneled its supplies right into the heart of the ROV. A column of thick black smoke rose languidly into the air.

"What happened?"

"Rotor blade come off, probably."

"Well don't that beat all?"

"That's fucking Vietnam. Don't nothing go like anybody expects."

"Who was on that bird?"

"Colonel. S2. Two pilots. Crew chief and gunner. And that guy from Time."

"Time? That short motherfucker with the curly brown hair and the wire-rim glasses? Kind of puffy under the eyes?"

"He wasn't so short. About my height."

"Damn!"

"What's the matter, Chief? Friend of yours or something?"

"I gave the dude my best stories."

"So what?"

"So, he was going to put me in the papers."

"Big fucking deal."

"Bigger than you know."

"You better off than he is, I'd say. Right now, anyway."

"Yeah, looks of it I am. Ain't that a kick in the head?"

"Funny, what happens to people. Anyway, you're better off maybe. I knew a guy got in big trouble talking to a reporter. Landed himself in fucking LBJ."

"Yeah, right, tell me about it. What are they gonna do? Send me to Nam?"

"You got that right, Chief."

"I got everything right. I'm on top of the world. I'm short as a motherfuckin' midget's dick. I'm practically out of here. You hear that, troop? Out of here. Out of here. I'm practically fucking out of here."

"Yeah, out of here," Kerry echoes on cue. And then he asks himself: Then what? Then where do we go? Who's gonna put the rest of our lives in the papers?

[end]