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  The Lieutenant depressed the button on the side of the mike, pursed his lips, and made a staticlike gritty noise with his tongue against his teeth—ccccccchhriiic-ccccccchhriiic—then he released the button.

  “This is Six, say again last transmission, over,” said Halleck.

  "Ccccccchhriiic . . . you're breaking up, Six . . . ccccccchhriiic. Can't read you,” the Lieutenant said into the mike, interspersing his words with static noise. He released the button.

  “This . . . is . . . Rattle . . . snake . . . Six,” came the answering transmission, one word at a time, an attempt to get words through clearly.

  “Ops . . . order . . . follows,” said the new battalion CO.

  The Lieutenant rolled his eyes and listened.

  “Grid . . . coordinates . . . three . . . six . . . seven . . .” There was a pause, as Halleck waited to see if the Lieutenant received his transmission.

  "Ccccccchhriiic . . . ccccccchhriiic,” said the Lieutenant.

  “Four . . . two . . . eight . . . do . . . you . . . read . . . me . . . over,” said Halleck.

  "Ccccccchhriiic . . . ccccccchhriiic . . . sssssppppppttttt,” said the Lieutenant. "Sssspppt . . . breaking . . . sssspppt . . . up, Six.”

  “Ops . . . order . . . grid,” came Halleck again, still trying to get through.

  The Lieutenant depressed the button again, sputtering into the mike for ten seconds, imitating static. Then he reached over to the PRC-25 and hit the radio's power switch, turning it off. He tossed the mike aside and reclined on his air mattress.

  “That takes care of Lieutenant Colonel Halleck, Dirtball. We're not going on any wild-goose chase in those boonies tonight and get mortared for three hours like the last time. Fuck him if he can't take a joke. Give me a shake around 0530, will you? I want to see Sergeant Davis and Repatch before first light. I'm sure Halleck's going to be out here sweating and puffing and strutting. I'd better make sure everyone's got a haircut and a shave and has a shirt to wear.”

  “Damn. You put a bad stick in his shit, huh, Eltee?” said Dirtball. “I'll see you in the mornin’, sir.”

  Dirtball crawled out the back of the 113 and the Lieutenant went back to staring at the red light again, his eyes drifting shut. Halleck might chopper his starched ass out to the boonies in the morning, but he wasn't going to get any of the Lieutenant's twenty-four resident olive-drab-clad asses shot off tonight.

  Lieutenant Blue rolled over on his side. He could hear Dirtball rustling around in the dark at the back of the track. The wind picked up, and red dust whipped through the red light inside the track like smoke from a fire in hell. He pulled his poncho liner around his shoulders to shield himself from the dust and the dark and the penetrating chill of the night air.

  That was the thing about Vietnam.

  It could get so damn hot during the day your skin would grow scales like a rattlesnake and your blood would run reptile-cold and you'd start looking around for rocks to sun yourself on, because that's what rattlesnakes did with the heat, they dug it, they reveled in it, they coiled around and stilled their rattles and said Bring it on, motherfucker, I'm an icy-ass rattlesnake, don't you know it? Your sun ain't gonna melt my frosty soul. . . .

  Then at night you'd shed your scales and turn into a kid hiding alone under a tent-fort on a rainy night in the dark and damned if it didn't cool off so much you'd need PJs and a quilt and a mama to hold you tight.

  And all you had was your fucking poncho liner.

  Vietnam.

  The thing about Halleck was, he was Vietnam in a nutshell. He didn't know what he was doing, and he didn't know why he was doing it, he just showed up every day to get his fucking ticket punched. And if the VC didn't get him, somebody else sure as hell would. Aw, hell, he'd probably end up getting a heatstroke on the Division tennis courts and rotating home on a goddamned stretcher with a nurse holding his hand.

  “Good night, Dirtball,” said the Lieutenant, who needed to hear another voice in the dark.

  “G'night, Eltee. Sleep tight, man,” said Dirtball in muffled tones from the back end of the track.

  He was under his poncho liner, too.

  One hundred and thirty-one . . . No! One hundred and thirty more days of this shit with Halleck breathing down your neck and Charlie looking down your shorts and twenty-four pairs of eyes and twenty-four pairs of ears watching you and listening to you all day and all night expecting more wisdom and needing more courage from your twenty-three years than you knew was in there . . .

  Jesus.

  He switched on the transistor radio again, and it crackled and Jimi Hendrix spat sparks into the dark:

  "Purple haze all in my brain,

  Baby please, you don't seem the same,

  I'm acting funny and I don't know why,

  ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”

  The lyrics flickered through his mind like radio static in the dark . . .

  The wind whistled through ventilation holes on the barrel of the .50-caliber up on top of the track, in tune with Hendrix. The red dust blew, and Hendrix wailed, and the Lieutenant pulled the poncho liner over his head and waited.

  Then the song faded and the red dust blew through the holes in the barrel of the fifty, whistling the songs of the war and the dark.

  He fell asleep on the downbeat.

  1

  * * *

  * * *

  The day he got the phone call that would change his life forever began the same way nearly every other day of his life had begun. It was five-thirty in the morning, and Colonel Matthew Nelson Blue III was driving to work at the Infantry School.

  Five-thirty in the morning on Monday was not many people's favorite time of day or day of the week, but it was Colonel Blue's. He was driving down Victory Boulevard, the main drag outside the gate of Fort Benning, Georgia, and with the sun low on the horizon out the left window of his 1955 Ford sedan, he had a view of familiar surroundings uncluttered by outsiders, nonbelievers, or civilians. He was alone on the road, driving to his battalion headquarters, and nothing was in his way.

  He stopped for a red light. Used-car lots occupied three of the four corners of the intersection. They were festooned with yellow and blue and green and red triangular flags hanging from lines crisscrossing the dusty clay fields of cars. Many of the cars, the Colonel knew, had been repossessed from the families of GIs who had missed payments because Dad was a corporal ten thousand miles away in Vietnam, and the family was having a hard time making ends meet on $245 a month, $135 of which was the base amount paid to an Army corporal, and $110 of which was “hazardous duty pay,” a sum set by Congress to compensate a soldier for his services overseas under fire during time of war.

  Next to each of the used-car lots, a row of trailers stood below signs advertising automobile and life insurance. Car insurance sold on the strip outside Fort Benning was twice the cost of insurance available just a mile away, in downtown Columbus, Georgia, and life insurance policies offered to GIs inside the trailers did not cover death in combat. The Colonel shook his head. He wondered when the communities that sat outside the gates of Army posts around the country would start backing up their conservative voting habits with attitudes that treated GIs as people instead of prey.

  Colonel Blue drove by the barrackslike Camellia Apartments and passed through the stone gates of Fort Benning. The commercial strip came to an abrupt halt and was replaced by a road of pastoral tranquility. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He wished that it weren't so, but every morning he reacted the same way to the long drive down the Benning strip. Lately, the topless go-go bars and tattoo parlors were being joined by bevies of fast-food joints, all-night convenience stores, and miniature-golf courses, but these latest additions to the landscape did little to soften the overall tawdriness of the scene. When he got to the headquarters of his unit, he knew the pile of paper on his desk would contain at least one repossession order against one of his men, and a half-dozen notices of arrest from the local gendarmerie, who
seemed to consider arresting GIs for minor infractions of the law as much a sport as a duty. This kind of crap didn't go on during World War II, the Colonel remembered. In those days the Army uniform had commanded respect, not derision. What was it about the war in a little country so far away that permitted people back home the illusion that nothing had changed, that everything was normal, that no allowances need be made for the fact that young men were losing their lives every single day of the week in defense of democracy and liberty? Had the nation gone stark raving mad?

  The Colonel shook his head and whistled through his teeth. Ahead, the brick buildings and manicured lawns of the main post beckoned reassuringly. At least here the madness had not yet intruded. At least here the blue Fort Benning stickers on the front and rear bumpers of the Ford drew a salute instead of unwanted extra attention from the traffic cops downtown. At least here on Fort Benning, Army life was comfortably predictable, the rocks were painted white, the picket fences ran straight and true, the cigarette butts were policed up every morning at reveille, the fatigues were starched olive drab, the boots sported spit-shines, the haircuts showed white sidewalls above the ears, and the phones were answered with a crisp “Yes, sir.”

  And here beneath the branches of the great live oaks, under lawns trimmed as short and neat as a recruit's hair, the dead were laid to rest with a twenty-one-gun salute and the mournful bugle call of taps, and the war was not ten thousand miles away, it was right here among us: in the eyes of the boys fresh off the farm and green from the ghetto, who snapped salutes with uncallused hands; in faces glowing so young and new they were kissable; in the chanted cadence of a platoon passing on a reveille run; in the neat rows of jeeps and three-quarters and deuce-and-a-halfs in the motor pool, in the sweet scent of gun oil in the weapons room, in the cough of the Sergeant Major's “Mornin’, sir,” affectionate and knowing and assertive and tired, in the smell of bacon and coffee wafting down from the mess hall through the battalion area. The war was the Army and the Army was the war, and forever the twain would meet amid the dust and the dirt and the clay and the sand under the pines and elms and oaks of Fort Benning, Georgia, as the Colonel trained yet more young men to go to war.

  “Mornin’, sir,” said Sergeant Major Armstrong Clinton as the Colonel eased open the orderly room door. Sergeant Major Clinton thrust a mug of coffee at the Colonel without looking up. With his other hand he was filling another cup. He blew into the cup and peered at the Colonel beneath eyebrows the size and color of small rats. His face had the ruddy complexion of one who had spent half his life outside in the hot sun and the other half inside the cool, dark recesses of the NCO Club. He had a bulbous nose and a cleft chin, he stood five feet four inches tall and was just about as wide at the shoulders. He reminded those who liked him of Jimmy Cagney and those who didn't of Joe Stalin. In truth, he had a little of both of them packed somewhere on his stubby frame. But the thing that set him apart was the fact that Sergeant Major Clinton was probably the only man on Fort Benning who had bribed his way into the Army, having slipped a five-dollar bill to the man who measured his height at the recruiting station on Whitehall Street in New York City the day after Pearl Harbor. The recruiter measured five-four, but he wrote down five feet six inches, and Sergeant Major Clinton signed up for the Infantry, where, he reasoned, anybody stupid enough to pay for the dubious privilege of humping a pack and a rifle as a dogface would be excused for having volunteered for it.

  He was right, of course. Sergeant Major Clinton was right about a lot of things. He was right, for example, about the Colonel.

  Colonel Matthew Nelson Blue was considered by many too nice to be a Colonel, too considerate to be a commander. It was right there in his face, at forty-five “as smooth as a baby's ass,” as Sergeant Major Clinton once described it to an old Army buddy over one too many beers at the NCO Club.

  “You should see the old man, Zeke,” said Sergeant Major Clinton. Sergeants major have called their colonels “the old man” since Attila the Hun swept across the plains of Asia.

  “Born with a silver spoon in his teeth and a golf club in his mitt, he was. Got a fine howdy-do and a smile for every swingin’ dick diddly-boppin’ his ass through the battalion area. He was any happier in this man's Army, you'd think there was somethin’ wrong with the Army, stead'a him. Makes you wonder, the old man does. Even knowin’ he comes from a fine old Army family and a fine old Virginia family at that, what on God's green earth keeps a man so up as him in a damn outfit so down as this one? You'd think he'd be sick of grinnin’, the way shit is goin’ these days. But not the Colonel. Old man Blue's about as blue as a damn Kansas sunflower growin’ in grade-A pigshit. I seen some sunny dispositions in my day, Zeke, but this one ain't sunny, it's nuclear.”

  There were those who would quarrel with Sergeant Major Clinton's description of his Colonel, but you'd find few of them in the 196th Infantry Brigade, the One-Nine-Six as the troops called it. The Colonel wasn't exactly a giant at five feet ten inches, but his slender build made him appear taller than he was. He wore a set of fatigues the way some men wear a Savile Row suit, as if baggy trousers and a roomy shirt had been designed and tailored for him and him alone. His face was unlined, but it wasn't undistinguished. He had a hockey scar over one eyebrow, and a kick from a polo pony when he was a boy had curved a shiny depression in his left cheekbone. The scars hadn't left him with boyish good looks, but neither had they given his face the grim cast of a wounded and angry man, which is what he was. You had to look in his eyes to glimpse the darkness within. You had to get to know the Colonel even to guess at what lay beneath his calm surface, and he was not an easy man to get to know. The countenance of the good-looking, easygoing Colonel was pure camouflage. He may have followed in his father's footsteps, but he looked just like his mother, a patrician Virginia lady of fine-boned breeding and demure stature who charmed everyone she came in contact with, even as she plotted how to have her way with them. The Colonel's was a handsome ease that concealed a steely resolve, which, in his case, had survived four decades of angry battle with a father who resembled him not at all in appearance, demeanor, or rank.

  His father was General Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., a bulldog of a man the size of Sergeant Major Clinton, who had the temper of a mule skinner, the ambition and drive of a rat on steroids, and an enviable political appointment as the nation's only ambassador-at-large. Neither man had asked for the other, not the father for the son, or the son for the father, and perhaps that was the point. They were stuck with each other, stuck in the same family, in the same Army, in the same country. They had hated each other for forty years. The Colonel had bitterly resented growing up in the long shadow cast by his father. His career in the Army had been eclipsed from its beginning by that of his father, a commander of divisions, corps, and armies, and a hero of monumental proportions during World War II. And the General had resented from the day his son was born the competition for his wife's affections that the boy represented. They had fought savagely until ten years ago, when the two men had simply stopped communicating. It seemed as if the planet wasn't big enough for the two of them, so they ignored the existence of one another. It was a battle fought not with words but from within a terrible conspiracy of silence that had taken its toll on both men. The son had twice developed a bleeding ulcer during their cold war. His father had in turn suffered a heart attack. They had watched each other's suffering from afar, but neither man had wavered. Such was the depth of their resentment and the strength of their hatred for one another.

  Colonel Blue took the mug of coffee from Sergeant Major Clinton and stood in the orderly room watching the men line up for reveille through the open door.

  “Going to be a nice day, Sarenmajor,” said the Colonel. Colonels had called sergeants major “Sarenmajor” since Hannibal's day.

  “You got that right, sir,” said Sergeant Major Clinton. “Not too hot. Only gonna be eighty-five today, sir.”

  “Is that right? That what the weather says?”


  “S'what I say, sir,” said Sergeant Major Clinton. He sipped his coffee and glanced at the Colonel over the lip of his cup. The old man was smiling up a storm.

  The Colonel picked up the newspaper and walked into his office at the end of the orderly room. The brigade was located in the last area of World War II temporary barracks still standing at Fort Benning, and the headquarters was a long, single-story building in the middle of four clusters of barracks, one for each company in the brigade. They weren't the finest accommodations a nation had ever erected for an Army, but Colonel Blue had specifically requested the aging clapboard structures, preferring them over the dormitory-like brick barracks that had gone up during the 1950s. He thought the older barracks were, well, more intimate. They were two-story wooden buildings painted a sickly pale green color, one platoon to a building, one bay to a floor. In the middle of each company area there was a small one-story building that served as company headquarters and weapons room. Next to it was a similar building that housed the company mess hall. The way the old World War II wooden barracks were arranged gave each company a sense of identity. You could look out a window in any of the barracks and see the rest of the Battalion gathered around you. You weren't just in the Army, you were in C Company, or A Company, or B Company, or Headquarters Company, and those men you could see through the windows next door weren't just another bunch of swingin’ dicks, they were your swingin’ dicks. They weren't just a gaggle of young men in funny green outfits, they were a unit.

  You woke them up in the morning and you fed them and you gave them a rifle and you marched them off somewhere and you pointed them in the right direction and they would kill for you. Then you fed them again and you put them to bed and the next morning they would do it all over again. Once a month you paid them about what workers in fast-food restaurants made, and occasionally you went downtown and collected them from some dingy jail. You helped some of them balance their checkbooks, and for others you wrote letters home and read the replies when they came in the mail. You taught them to clean and polish and to fire their weapons. You learned their names, and the names of their wives and their children if they had any, and you remembered that which made each man an individual—this one was an all-state football player, that one a champion pool hustler, that one over there an assistant professor of English at Columbia, and the shy one with the yellow hair and perpetually dirty hands was a pig farmer back in Tennessee.