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  “Memphis Soul Stew” died out, and the needle began rubbing back and forth against the paper record label, making a scratching sound. Broyer quickly lifted the tone arm, stopping the turntable.

  “How’s Mallory?” Mellas asked.

  “How do you think, Lieutenant?” Jackson said. “He got his fucking mouth smashed in with a machine gun and his head hurts.”

  “And he ain’t eaten for a week,” Mole put in.

  “I don’t think Cassidy hit him in the face on purpose,” Mellas said.

  “Sheeit,” Mole spat out.

  “Well, I don’t think he did it on purpose.”

  “Thing is, Lieutenant, it happened,” Jackson said.

  “Do you think there’s going to be trouble?”

  “Trouble?” Jackson looked around him, indicating their situation by opening his hands to the jungle and clouds. “What’s trouble? It’s just a different form of shit, Lieutenant.” Faces that had been cheerful a moment before turned sullen. Mellas knew his presence had become inconvenient.

  “I say waste the motherfucker,” Parker said. It was almost dark and he was leaning back against the dirt of a shallow hole. China was sitting on Parker’s left, looking into the forest, chewing on a stick, trying to ease his body’s cry for carbohydrates. A light drizzle collected on his poncho and ran off in tiny streams. Mallory was on Parker’s right, elbows on his knees, holding his head and staring blankly at the ground.

  “We ain’t wastin’ nobody, Parker,” said China.

  “How you let a fucking pig like that live, huh?”

  “I don’t let him live. I got nothin’ to do with him livin’. Or dyin’,” he added pointedly.

  “Henry’d kill the mother.”

  China noted the threat but said nothing. Henry might very well kill Cassidy, but that was where Henry was stupid. The knowledge that Henry would kill somebody if he was crossed, however, was also what kept him in command. China knew that if he got a reputation for being soft, he’d never take over when Henry rotated back home. Still, he couldn’t just kill somebody. It was also too easy to figure out who had the motive in the company. It had to be done so it meant something. Either that or make it look like an accident. Ultimately, though, he didn’t want to risk his weapons-smuggling operation.

  “How you doing, bro?” China asked Mallory, changing the subject. He leaned over and looked across Parker’s chest.

  “It fucking hurts, China. You got to help me get out of the bush.”

  “We got to get all the brothers out the bush,” China said, his voice rising. He despised Mallory and wanted to jerk him up by the collar and tell him to act like a man, but he also knew a good cause when he saw one. You just keep on moaning, Mallory, my man, he thought.

  “You ain’t going to do nothing about Cassidy beating on Mallory?” Parker asked. He was looking at a mosquito that was sucking blood from his arm.

  “Course I’m gonna do something. But when the time be right.” China slapped at a mosquito on his face.

  Parker put his thumb on the bloated mosquito on his arm and burst it, spreading blood on his skin. “Blood, China.”

  “When the time be right.”

  “Tonight.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, man,” Parker said angrily to Mallory. He stood up and slapped at a few more mosquitoes that were hovering around his face. “We better get back before Bass or College Boy finds us gone.”

  In the silence China could hear Jackson’s record player. Jackson. If he could team up with Jackson, letting him organize the brothers in the bush, then he’d go back to the rear and start finding more Jacksons for the other companies. Man, an organization like that and they’d get fucking tanks to the brothers back home.

  When full dark ended the 100 percent alert, Jackson was working on organizing his pack. He watched China walk up to Parker and Broyer and go through the handshake. Then he saw China coming for him.

  China squatted down next to him. Jackson pulled a strap into place. “All we do, man, is pack and fuckin’ unpack,” China said. “I do that much packin’ back home I be a real travelin’ man.”

  Jackson smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “Where is back home for you, man?”

  “Cleveland.”

  “O-hi-oh.”

  “Yep. Oh-hi-oh.”

  “You ever get high?”

  “Once. In San Diego. This sister had marijuana.”

  “That shit be bad for the black man.”

  “I’m told it bad for ever’one.” Jackson sighed, looking back six months into the past, seeing nothing but the small dark apartment, the funky red lava lamp, a black light making the fuzz picture of a girl in a paisley sari glow chartreuse—and Kyella. My God. Sweet Kyella Weed. He came back to the war. “Kinda fun, though.”

  “Yeah. That be its problem. The fucking British enslave millions of the yellow man with opium.”

  “I didn’t get the shit from no Brit. I got it from a brother.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But that brother ain’t doin’ us no good, man. He doin’ us no good. The Muslims, they don’t like drugs. And they right. Drugs, they enslave millions of yellow people and the red man, too.”

  “China, I don’t want be talkin’ politics. I’m tired and I gotta fight a war on a empty stomach.”

  “That’s right. A war against brown people. James Rado say the draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people. No black man should be forced to fight to defend a racist government. That be Article Six of the Black Panther Ten-Point Program.”

  “What good you terrorist friends in Oakland doin’ ’cept makin’ money writin’ books? Soul on Ice. Sheeit. I don’t see no brave-ass Panthers over here.”

  “That’s the point. They ain’t over here fightin’ the white man’s war.”

  Jackson’s anger at being placed in positions he didn’t like and from which he couldn’t escape spilled out of him. “They ain’t fightin’ the black man’s war. That’s what they ain’t fightin’. They just stirrin’ up trouble. Just like you. I don’t need you fuckin’ shit, China. I don’t need it.” Jackson paused. “You know who the real people fightin’ the black man’s war are? I’m gonna tell you who. It that little girl go to school in Little Rock, wear a nice dress, scared shitless. She don’t pack no heat, but that picture a her walkin’ to school between federal marshals turned hearts. It those college boys gettin’ murdered for registerin’ voters. Yeah, white college boys. It people like Mose Wright.” He paused. “I bet chew don’t have a fuckin’ idea ’bout Mose Wright do you, Mr. Black History?”

  China threw his hands open in disgust. “OK. You be the preacher man. You tell me. Who Mose Wright?”

  “You ever hear of Emmett Till?”

  “Wha’chew think?”

  “Yeah. I be seven and I see that puffy face with the eye hanging out in Ebony magazine and I never, never, forget that face. But I don’t live in Mississippi. You don’t live in Mississippi. Mose Wright, he Emmett Till’s uncle, and he live in Mississippi where they hang you from a tree with you nuts cut off and throw you in the river with iron fan blades wrap ’roun’ you black dead-ass neck. You speak up against that shit in Mississippi, you as good as dead. But Mose Wright, no education, no money, no nothin’ except heart, he goes to the trial a those motherfuckers killed Emmett Till, rigged like it was, and he says ‘D’ere!’ And he point his fingers at the killers. Right there in that all-white courthouse. ‘D’ere!’ Right there, knowin’ they’d be after him next, all alone, no help from the law.”

  “Yeah, shit man.” China was momentarily stopped. Then he launched back. “Only those two chucks, they got off. They runnin’ ’round loose today. They even make money tellin’ ’bout it. They tell some white magazine that they done the killin’ and that printed all over the country and they still get off.”

  “Sure. But this time everone knows and sees through. This time the light got shined on that fucked-up county courthouse. It got shined all over the fuckin’ country. And why? Why this time? ’Cause that little black man and that pointin’ finger a his.”

  “So what chew doing, blac
k boy? They get off. You just gonna let shit like that go down? Do nothin’?”

  “What I supposed do?”

  “You can start by protestin’ the way this fuckin’ racist Marine Corps be run ’round here. We got brothers without R & R. We got fuckin’ racist country-western crackers castratin’ our brother Parker right in front of everybody, and that same fuckin’ honky smash another our brothers in the mouth with a fuckin’ machine gun, and you, you be movin’ into management . You be part of the fuckin’ problem, man.”

  “Look to me like chuck dudes humpin’ and gettin’ killed just like splib dudes,” Jackson said, struggling to stay cool. “Chucks not gettin’ any food, just like the brothers. We be about one out of twelve just like back home.”

  “How many officers in this regiment be brothers?”

  “One.”

  “And you don’t think it racist?” China asked.

  “How the brothers gonna be officers if they don’t be squad leaders?”

  “How the brothers gonna be free if they don’t stand together?” Jackson locked eyes with China, and China stared right back.

  Mellas and Hamilton were too tired to build a hooch, so they spent the night lying next to each other in a shallow hole. It rained. They didn’t care. Gradually, the rain began to fill the shallow hole with water. Mellas dreamed he was in a bathtub and the hot water had run out. He didn’t want to get out because it was even colder out of the tub. A long way off, he could hear Hamilton’s frightened voice. “Goddamn it, Lieutenant, you got to get up and move. Please, sir, get up and move.”

  Hamilton pulled Mellas to his feet. Mellas, in the stupor of hypothermia, slowly started to move. The world around him—the dark forest, his rifle, the rain, Hamilton—seemed incoherent, whirling. Hamilton jumped around with him, grabbing him, turning him, the two of them doing a macabre dance.

  Mellas’s body responded. It began to produce heat. His mind started to clear. He stumbled off to check the lines, realizing that Hamilton had probably saved his life.

  Cassidy lay in the dark, listening to Lieutenant Hawke’s deep even breathing. He thought about how Lieutenant Mellas’s warning had probably saved several kids from hypothermia. He smiled. He might have made Marine Corps history as the only company gunny to have lost men by freezing to death in a jungle.

  He looked at his watch. 0438. Back home he would have already been fixing a silent breakfast, trying not to disturb Martha and the baby before slipping out the door. He’d start the engine and wait a moment for it to warm up, watching the darkened house. Perhaps he’d check his crisply starched uniform, or the boots or shoes he’d shined the night before, and then he’d take one last look at the house before pulling away. The few feelings that Cassidy did allow himself were either those he could express openly for the Marine Corps or those that were intimate, like his feeling for his family, which arose only in quiet moments when he was alone, waiting for cars to warm up or waking in the dark and lying very still. Cassidy knew he was lucky to be married to Martha because she would never ask him to choose between the family and the Marine Corps. If he were forced to choose, he’d choose family. But he would hesitate.

  This feeling for the Corps was why Cassidy was hurt so deeply when he found that the pin on one of his grenades had been bent straight. Gravity would eventually pull the grenade from the pin, and the grenade would explode. Cassidy moved out with the company that morning pretending nothing had happened, but he felt apprehensive and alone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was the fifth day without food, and the company moved in a stupor, descending from the mountains into a valley. The air pressed down on them like a towel in a steam room. Hands burned from using ropes on the cliffs. Williams’s body was putrefying faster as they descended to warmer air, and some fluid was already dripping out of the poncho. The skin on the hands had started to slough off. The feet had swelled within Williams’s boots. He stank. Flies tormented the kids who carried him.

  Hippy’s feet grew worse. He took his bootlaces off to accommodate the swelling. He looked like a sleepwalker. He would murmur to himself, “Can you take this step now?” and then take the step. He repeated this procedure hour after hour, a spirit carried by crippled feet.

  Mellas felt as if he were suffocating. He was nauseated but had nothing to throw up. His clothes clung like saran wrap. With everyone’s electrolyte balance messed up, he worried about heat exhaustion.

  They reached the valley, where a torrent of white water cut through the jungle floor to naked bedrock. Mellas decided to move in the water. Speed was now everything. Colonel Simpson had been calling Fitch every half hour for the past two days, telling him it was “imperative” that the company reach Checkpoint Echo by 1200 hours. The words kept repeating themselves in Mellas’s head, like a song that won’t go away. It is imperative you reach Checkpoint Echo by 1200 hours. Security lapsed. Maybe Marines were in trouble and they couldn’t say over the radio. They swung east, sometimes chest deep in the swift water. Their penises shrank to nubs and their scrotal sacs pulled their testicles deep up inside them. Their arms grew weary, holding their weapons up out of the water.

  Fitch told Relsnik to stop answering. It took far more juice to broadcast than to receive. In truth, there were only a couple of batteries in the whole company that had any chance of reaching another unit if the company got into the shit.

  Mellas gave up on security. He pulled in the flankers who were moving in the jungle on both sides of the river and led the company straight downstream, Vancouver on point and Mellas behind him.

  Occasionally someone fell. The current would then suck him under, his heavy pack and weapons dragging him down, until someone could reach him and help him regain his feet. Once it was Pollini. Mellas happened to be looking back at the column and saw Pollini miss Cortell’s outstretched hand and fall backward into the river. He just watched, numb like everyone else. Then he threw his pack on the bank and started wading out to the middle of the river, grabbing Hamilton’s hand and shouting orders to form a human chain. But they didn’t move fast enough. Pollini went past them like an express train on the inside track. Mellas saw him surface, right in the middle where it was deep and fast, bouncing downstream. His helmet smashed against rocks, probably saving his skull from being cracked. Mellas watched him go down for what he thought had to be the last time, but Pollini hit a big rock and it spun him over toward the shallows.

  Pollini just lay there. He was too far away for Mellas to tell if he was still breathing. The kids who’d tried to reach him with the human chain turned back exhausted. No one wanted to go the distance to get him. Mellas idly contemplated shooting him so they’d know for certain he had died. Then Pollini moved. He got to his hands and knees and stayed in that position for a long time, breathing visibly, the water flowing beneath his chest. Then he struggled to his feet, grinned, and waved.

  Hamilton raised an imaginary glass and said, “Here’s to you, Shortround.”

  Pollini hitched his pack up on his back and came grinning and splashing back to the column. Mellas whispered, “Shortround, you’re a good fucking man.”

  The river swung in the wrong direction. Mellas and Vancouver struggled up the steep south bank and faced solid elephant grass and bamboo. Mellas seriously thought of just following the river wherever it went. That would be so much easier. But he and Vancouver waded into the tangle of stalks, both of them slashing with machetes. The platoon wearily climbed out of the water and followed them into the dank oven. The steaming towel of the air smothered them in its folds.

  By late afternoon the day was dying beneath rapidly building clouds. Mellas leaned back on his pack, trying to keep the frag order out of his pounding brain, and watched huge clouds darken the tree-tops above him. If it rained, they’d be slowed even more. If it rained, the noise would cover them and they’d be cool. If they got hit in their condition, they’d never make it out alive. It is imperative you reach Checkpoint Echo by 1200 hours. A gust of cold wind suddenly swept through the sweltering jungle air. Then the first spattering of rain fel
l. Then it fell in a steady continuous roar.

  The rain continued into the night. They stumbled on in the dark, the glowing green tip of the compass needle in Mellas’s hand moving before him. Then Vancouver hit a trail that headed south. Checkpoint Echo was south of them. “Take it,” Mellas said. “Fuck the ambushes.” He figured that if he died he wouldn’t have to worry about the fucking decision anyway.

  Word came up the line that Hippy had stopped moving. When Mellas reached him, Hippy could say nothing. He stood upright, swaying between two friends, his machine gun still cradled on his shoulder. He was staring emptily ahead. Mellas finally spoke. “Can you keep going, Hippy? Just a few more hours.”

  Hippy looked at him from a long way away. Then he nodded. Mellas nodded back, watching Hippy’s face. It was just the face of an eighteen-year-old kid with a peace medallion around his neck. Hippy wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, had straggly hair, and had the beginnings of a beard. An ordinary human face. Mellas had never really looked at one before.

  They made it to Checkpoint Echo about an hour before dawn, formed a circle, and collapsed on the ground.

  Lieutenant Stevens, the artillery liaison officer, being junior, had the early morning watch again when Fitch radioed in that Bravo Company was at Checkpoint Echo, back in communication, but with weak power sources, and waiting for further orders. He was requesting food and an emergency medical evacuation for about ten Marines, a body, and a German shepherd.

  Twenty minutes later, Stevens briefed Lieutenant Colonel Simpson when Simpson made his customary visit before breakfast. Simpson asked when they’d arrived. Stevens, knowing that Fitch was already in trouble for being slow, tried to help out by saying that they’d reached Echo around 2200 hours the night before.