The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

THE GHOST VILLAGE Peter Straub

In Vietnam I knew a man who went quietly and purposefully crazy because his wife wrote him that his son had been sexually abused—“messed with”—by the leader of their church choir. This man was a black six-foot-six grunt named Leonard Hamnet, from a small town in Tennessee named Archibald. Before writing, his wife had waited until she had endured the entire business of going to the police, talking to other parents, returning to the police with another accusation, and finally succeeding in having the man charged. He was up for trial in two months. Leonard Hamnet was no happier about that than he was about the original injury.

“I got to murder him, you know, but I’m seriously thinking on murdering her too,” he said. He still held the letter in his hands, and he was speaking to Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Conor Linklater, SP4 Cotton, Calvin Hill, Tina Pumo, the magnificent M. O. Dengler, and myself. “All this is going on, my boy needs help, this here Mr. Brewster needs to be dismantled, needs to be racked and stacked,

and she don’t tell me! Makes me want to put her down, man. Take her damn head off and put it up on a stake in the yard, man. With a sign saying: Here is one stupid woman."

We were in the unofficial part of Camp Crandall known as No Man’s Land, located between the wire perimeter and a shack, also unofficial, where a cunning little weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor. No Man’s Land, so called because the C.O. pretended it did not exist, contained a mound of old tires, a pisstube, and a lot of dusty red ground. Leonard Hamnet gave the letter in his hand a dispirited look, folded it into the pocket of his fatigues, and began to roam around the heap of tires, aiming kicks at the ones that stuck out furthest. "One stupid woman,” he repeated. Dust exploded up from a burst, worn-down wheel of rubber.

I wanted to make sure Hamnet knew he was angry with Mr. Brewster, not his wife, and said, "She was trying—”

Hamnet’s great glistening bull’s head turned toward me.

"Look at what the woman did. She nailed that bastard. She got other people to admit that he messed with their kids too. That must be almost impossible. And she had the guy arrested. He’s going to be put away for a long time.”

“I’ll put that bitch away, too,” Hamnet said, and kicked an old gray tire hard enough to push it nearly a foot back into the heap. All the other tires shuddered and moved. For a second it seemed that the entire mound might collapse.

"This is my boy I’m talking about here,” Hamnet said. “This shit has gone far enough.”

“The important thing,” Dengler said, “is to take care of your boy. You have to see he gets help.”

"How’m I gonna do that from here?” Hamnet shouted.

“Write him a letter,” Dengler said. “Tell him you love him. Tell him he did right to go to his mother. Tell him you think about him all the time.”

Hamnet took the letter from his pocket and stared at it. It was already stained and wrinkled. I did not think it could survive many more of Hamnet’s readings. His face seemed to get heavier, no easy trick with a face like Hamnet’s. “I got to get home,” he said. “I got to get back home and take care of these people.”

Hamnet began putting in requests for compassionate leave relentlessly—one request a day. When we were out on patrol, sometimes I saw him unfold the tattered sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket and read it two or three times, concentrating intensely. When the letter began to shred along the folds, Hamnet taped it together.

We were going out on four-and five-day patrols during that period, taking a lot of casualties. Hamnet performed well in the field, but he had retreated so far within himself that he spoke in monosyllables. He wore a dull, glazed look, and moved like a man who had just eaten a heavy dinner. I thought he looked like he had given up, and when people gave up they did not last long—they were already very close to death, and other people avoided them.

We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. We had to eat cold C rations because heating them with C-4 it would have been like putting up billboards and arc lights. We couldn’t smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. Hamnet’s C rations consisted of an old can of Spam that dated from an earlier war and a can of peaches. He saw Spanky staring at the peaches and tossed him the can. Then he dropped the Spam between his legs. Death was almost visible around him. He fingered the note out of his pocket and tried to read it in the damp gray twilight.

At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the Lieutenant yelled “Shit\”, and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.

The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy named Tyrell Budd coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.

One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the damp but solid ground on the other side of the paddy. Here the trees were much sparser, and a little group of thatched huts was visible through them.

Then two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. That was the first thing. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth, and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. Whoever fired the mortar should have had an excellent idea of our location, and I experienced that endless moment of pure, terrifying helplessness—a moment in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to let go of it—until the shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us, and shell fragments whizzed through the air. One of the fragments sailed over us, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage’s helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground, and a little smoke drifted up from it.

We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, except that he was breathing. Hamnet shouldered his pack and picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder. He saw me looking at him.

“I gotta take care of these people,” he said.

The other thing I did not understand—apart from why there had been only one mortar round—came when we entered the village.

Lieutenant Harry Beevers had yet to join us, and we were nearly a year away from the events at la Thuc, when everything, the world and ourselves within the world, went crazy. I have to explain what happened. Lieutenant Harry Beevers killed thirty children in a cave at la Thuc and their bodies disappeared, but Michael Poole and I went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened in there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands. A pitiful character named Victor Spitalny ran into the cave when he heard gunfire, and came pinwheeling out right away, screaming, covered with welts or hives that vanished almost as soon as he came out into the air. Poor Spitalny had touched it too. Because I was twenty and already writing books in my head, 1 thought that the cave was the place where the other Tom Sawyer ended, where Injun Joe raped Becky Thatcher and slit Tom’s throat.

When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of la Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The little huts, still inhabitable, were empty—something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again. It was a ghost village, in a country where people thought the earth was sanctified by their ancestors’ bodies.

Poole’s map said that the place was named Bong To.

Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.

Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. “I caught a head wound,” he said.

“You wouldn’t have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner,” Hamnet said.

Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. “I see double,” he said. “I’ll never get that helmet back on.”

The medic said, “Take it easy, we’ll get you out of here.”

“Out of here?” Spanky brightened up.

“Back to Crandall,” the medic said.

Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. “There ain’t nobody here,” Spitalny said. “What the fuck is going on?” He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.

Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat.

“Spitalny, Tiano,” the Lieutenant said. “Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now.”

Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was Spitalny’s only friend, said, “You do it this time, Lieutenant.”

Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.

“Hey, I'm gone, I’m already there,” Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitos had found us.

“So?” Poole said.

Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots. He said, “I have to go home, Lieutenant. I don’t mean no disrespect, but I cannot take this shit much longer.”

The Lieutenant said he was working on it.

Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village.

Spanky Burrage said, “Good quiet place for Ham to catch up on his reading.”

“Maybe I better take a look,” the Lieutenant said. He flicked the lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitos and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.

The Lieutenant said something almost inaudible from inside the hut. He came back outside in a hurry, looking disturbed and puzzled even in the darkness.

“Underhill, Poole,” he said, “I want you to see this.”

Poole and I glanced at each other. I wondered if I looked as bad as he did. Poole seemed to be couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the Lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen’s eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same.

“What is it, Lieutenant?” he asked.

The Lieutenant gestured for us to come to the hut, then turned around and went back inside. There was no reason for us not to follow him. The Lieutenant was a jerk, but Harry Beevers, our next Lieutenant, was a baron, an earl among jerks, and we nearly always did whatever dumb thing he told us to do. Poole was so ragged and edgy that he looked as if he felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the Lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I didn’t have an idea in the world what was going on in Poole’s mind. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.

The Lieutenant was standing in the doorway, looking over his shoulder and fingering his sidearm. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on the lighter. The sudden hollows and shadows in his face made him resemble one of the corpses I had opened up when I was in graves registration at Camp White Star.

“You want to know what it is, Poole? Okay, you tell me what it is.”

He held the lighter before him like a torch and marched into the hut. I imagined the entire dry, flimsy structure bursting into heat and flame. This Lieutenant was not destined to get home walking and breathing, and I pitied and hated him about equally, but I did not want to turn into toast because he had found an American body inside a hut and didn’t know what to do about it. I’d heard of platoons finding the mutilated corpses of American prisoners, and hoped that this was not our turn.

And then, in the instant before I smelled blood and saw the Lieutenant stoop to lift a panel on the floor, I thought that what had spooked him was not the body of an American POW but of a child who had been murdered and left behind in this empty place. The Lieutenant had probably not seen any dead children yet. Some part of the Lieutenant was still worrying about what a girl named Becky Rodden-burger was getting up to back at Idaho State, and a dead child would be too much reality for him.

He pulled up the wooden panel in the floor, and I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The Lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell of blood floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The Lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. “Now. Tell me what this is.”

“It’s where they hide the kids when people like us show up,” I said. “Smells like something went wrong. Did you take a look?”

I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn’t about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.

“Taking a look is your job, Underhill,” he said.

For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.

“Give me the lighter,” Poole said, and grabbed it away from the Lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the Lieutenant and myself by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The Lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.

The lighter flared again. I could see Poole’s extended arm, the jittering little fire, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed room was less than an inch above the top of Poole’s head. He moved away from the opening.

“What is it? Are there any—” The Lieutenant’s voice made a creaky sound. “Any bodies?”

“Come down here, Tim,” Poole called up.

I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped down.

Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was almost sickeningly strong.

What do you see?” the Lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.

I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed old bloodstains.

“Hot,” Poole said, and closed the lighter.

Come on, damn it,” came the Lieutenant’s voice. “Get out of there.”

Yes, sir, Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room, and the topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like poetry, like the left-hand pages of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.

“Well, well,” Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains, and we saw dried blood on the metal links.

I want you guys out of there, and I mean now,” whined the Lieutenant.

Poole snapped the lighter shut.

“I just changed my mind,” I said softly. “I’m putting twenty bucks into the Elijah fund. For two weeks from today. That’s what, June twentieth?”

Tell it to Spanky,” he said. Spanky Burrage had invented the pool we called the Elijah fund, and he held the money. Michael had not put any money into the pool. He thought that a new Lieutenant might be even worse than the one we had. Of course he was right. Harry Beevers was our next Lieutenant. Elijah Joys, Lieutenant Elijah Joys of New Utrecht, Idaho, a graduate of the University of Idaho and basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, was an inept, weak Lieutenant, not a disastrous one. If Spanky could have seen what was coming, he would have given back the money and prayed for the safety of Lieutenant Joys.

Poole and I moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The Lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand—uselessly, because he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We levered ourselves up out of the hole stiff-armed, as if we were leaving a swimming pool. The Lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and thick, fleshy nose, and his Adam’s apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. He might not have been Harry Beevers, but he was no prize. “Well, how many?”

“How many what?” I asked.

“How many are there?” He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a good body count.

“There weren’t exactly any bodies, Lieutenant,” said Poole, trying to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.

“Well, what’s that good for?” He meant, How is that going to help me?

“Interrogations, probably,” Poole said. “If you questioned someone down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you could just drag the body into the woods. ”

Lieutenant Joys nodded. “Field Interrogation Post,” he said, trying out the phrase. “Torture, Use of, Highly Indicated.” He nodded again. “Right?”

“Highly,” Poole said.

“Shows you what kind of enemy we’re dealing with in this conflict.”

I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space with Elijah Joys, and I took a step toward the door of the hut. I did not know what Poole and I had seen, but I knew it was not a Field Interrogation Post, Torture, Use of, Highly Indicated, unless the Vietnamese had begun to interrogate monkeys. It occurred to me that the writing on the wall might have been names instead of poetry—I thought that we had stumbled into a mystery that had nothing to do with the war, a Vietnamese mystery.

For a second music from my old life, music too beautiful to be endurable, started playing in my head. Finally I recognized it: “The Walk to the Paradise Gardens,” from A Village Romeo and Juliet by Frederick Delius. Back in Berkeley, I had listened to it hundreds of times.

If nothing else had happened, I think I could have replayed the whole piece in my head. Tears filled my eyes, and I stepped toward the door of the hut. Then I froze. A ragged Vietnamese boy of seven or eight was regarding me with great seriousness from the far corner of the hut. I knew he was not there—I knew he was a spirit. I had no belief in spirits, but that’s what he was. Some part of my mind as detached as a crime reporter reminded me that “The Walk to the Paradise Gardens” was about two children who were about to die, and that in a sense the music was their death. I wiped my eyes with my hand, and when I lowered my arm, the boy was still there. He was beautiful, beautiful in the ordinary way, as Vietnamese children nearly always seemed beautiful to me. Then he vanished all at once, like the flickering light of the Zippo. I nearly groaned aloud. That child had been murdered in the hut: he had not just died, he had been murdered.

I said something to the other two men and went through the door into the growing darkness. I was very dimly aware of the Lieutenant asking Poole to repeat his description of the uprights and the bloody chain. Hamnet and Burrage and Calvin Hill were sitting down and leaning against a tree. Victor Spitalny was wiping his hands on his filthy shirt. White smoke curled up from Hill’s cigarette, and Tina Pumo exhaled a long white stream of vapor. The unhinged thought came to me with an absolute conviction that this was the Paradise Gardens. The men lounging in the darkness; the pattern of the cigarette smoke, and the patterns they made, sitting or standing; the in-drawing darkness, as physical as a blanket; the frame of the trees and the flat gray-green background of the paddy.

My soul had come back to life.

Then I became aware that there was something wrong about the men arranged before me, and again it took a moment for my intelligence to catch up to my intuition. Every member of a combat unit makes unconscious adjustments as members of the unit go down in the field; survival sometimes depends on the number of people you know are with you, and you keep count without being quite aware of doing it. I had registered that two men too many were in front of me. Instead of seven, there were nine, and the two men that made up the nine of us left were still behind me in the hut. M. O. Dengler was looking at me with growing curiosity, and I thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. A sick chill went through me. I saw Tom Blevins and Tyrell Budd standing together at the far right of the platoon, a little muddier than the others but otherwise different from the rest only in that, like Dengler, they were looking directly at me.

Hill tossed his cigarette away in an arc of light. Poole and Lieutenant Joys came out of the hut behind me. Leonard Hamnet patted his pocket to reassure himself that he still had his letter. I looked back at the right of the group, and the two dead men were gone.

Let s saddle up, the Lieutenant said. “We aren’t doing any good around here.”

“Tim?” Dengler asked. He had not taken his eyes off me since I had come out of the hut. I shook my head.

“Well, what was it?” asked Tina Pumo. “Was it juicy?”

Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.

“Aren’t we gonna torch this place?” asked Spitalny.

The Lieutenant ignored him. “Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post. Field Interrogation Post.”

“No shit,” said Pumo.

“These people are into torture, Pumo. It’s just another indication.”

“Gotcha.” Pumo glanced at me and his eyes grew curious. Dengler moved closer.

“I was just remembering something,” I said. “Something from the world.”

“You better forget about the world while you’re over here, Underhill,” the Lieutenant told me. “I’m trying to keep you alive, in case you hadn’t noticed, but you have to cooperate with me.” His Adam’s apple jumped like a begging puppy.

As soon as he went ahead to lead us out of the village, I gave twenty dollars to Spanky and said, “Two weeks from today.”

“My man,” Spanky said.

The rest of the patrol was uneventful.

The next night we had showers, real food, alcohol, cots to sleep in. Sheets and pillows. Two new guys replaced Tyrell Budd and Thomas Blevins, whose names were never mentioned again, at least by me, until long after the war was over and Poole, Linklater, Pumo, and I looked them up, along with the rest of our dead, on the Wall in Washington. I wanted to forget the patrol, especially what I had seen and experienced inside the hut. I wanted the oblivion which came in powdered form.

I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was sitting in the brothers’ tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R & R in Taipei. Spanky Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisal: great jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his friends back in Little Rock and which he knew so well he could find individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions, changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under different names—“Cherokee” and “K0K0,” “Indiana” and “Donna Lee”—or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words—“I Thought About You” (Art Tatum), “You and the Night and the Music” (Sonny Rollins), “I Love You” (Bill Evans), “If I Could Be with You” (Ike Quebec), “You Leave Me Breathless,” (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, “Thou Swell,” by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.

On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown’s music sounded regal and unearthly. Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Gardens. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. We were out of the war. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.

After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, “Enough.” The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.

Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces Radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.

“Leonard,” I said, and he swung his big buffalo’s head toward me. “You still putting in for compassionate leave?”

He nodded. “You know what I gotta do.”

“Yes,” Dengler said, in a slow quiet voice.

“They gonna let me take care of my people. They gonna send me back.”

He spoke with a complete absence of nuance, like a man who had learned to get what he wanted by parroting words without knowing what they meant.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. For a second he seemed as alien as Hamnet. “What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it’ll just go on like this day after day until some of us get killed and the rest of us go home, or do you think it’s going to get stranger and stranger?” He did not wait for me to answer. “I think it’ll always sort of look the same, but it won’t be—I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that’s what happens when you're out here long enough. The edges melt.”

“Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler,” Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.

Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, and never looked as though he belonged in uniform. “Here’s what I mean, kind of,” he said. “When we were listening to that trumpet player—”

“Brownie, Clifford Brown,” Spanky whispered.

“—I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time.”

“Sweetie-pie,” Spanky said softly. “You pretty hip, for a little ofay square.” “When we were back in that village, last week,” Dengler said. “Tell me about that. ”

I said that he had been there too.

“But something happened to you. Something special.”

“I put twenty bucks in the Elijah fund,” I said.

“Only twenty?” Cotton asked.

“What was in that hut?” Dengler asked.

I shook my head.

“All right,” Dengler said. “But it’s happening, isn’t it? Things are changing.”

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Cotton and Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and a murdered child. I smiled and shook my head.

“Fine,” Dengler said.

“What the fuck you sayin’ is fine?” Cotton said. “I don’t mind listening to that music, but I do draw the line at this bullshit.” He flipped himself off his bunk and pointed a finger at me. “What date you give Spanky?”

“Fifteenth.”

“He last longer than that.” Cotton tilted his head as the song on the radio ended. Armed Forces Radio began playing a song by Moby Grape. Disgusted, he turned back to me. “Check it out. End of August. He be so tired, he be sleepwalkin’. Be halfway through his tour. The fool will go to pieces, and that’s when he’ll get it. ” Cotton had put thirty dollars on August thirty-first, exactly the midpoint of Lieutenant Joys’ tour of duty. He had a long time to adjust to the loss of the money, because he himself stayed alive until a sniper killed him at the beginning of February. Then he became a member of the ghost platoon that followed us wherever we went. I think this ghost platoon, filled with men I had loved and detested, whose names I could or could not remember, disbanded only when I went to the Wall in Washington, D.C., and by then I felt that I was a member of it myself.

I left the tent with a vague notion of getting outside and enjoying the slight coolness that followed the rain. The packet of Si Van Vo’s white powder rested at the bottom of my right front pocket, which was so deep that my fingers just brushed its top. I decided that what I needed was a beer.

Wilson Manly’s shack was all the way on the other side of camp. I never liked going to the enlisted men’s club, where they were rumored to serve cheap Vietnamese beer in American bottles. Certainly the bottles had often been stripped of their labels, and to a suspicious eye the caps looked dented; also, the beer there never quite tasted like the stuff Manly sold.

One other place remained, farther away than the enlisted men’s club but closer than Manly’s shack and somewhere between them in official status. About twenty minutes’ walk from where I stood, just at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy himself, supposedly a Green Beret Captain who had installed a handful of bar girls in an old French command post, had gone home long ago, but his club had endured. There were no more girls, if there ever had been, and the brand-name liquor was about as reliable as the enlisted men’s club’s beer. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. They spoke almost no English. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post, even one that had been transformed into a bordello: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. The wood was soft with rot. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. Around six thirty the light bounced off the long foxed mirror that stood behind the row of bottles. After five minutes of blinding light, the sun disappeared beneath the pine boards, and for ten or fifteen minutes a shadowy pink glow filled the barroom. There was no electricity and no ice. Fingerprints covered the glasses. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal boot-prints on either side of a hole in the floor.

The building stood in a little grove of trees in the curve of the descending road, and as I walked toward it in the diffuse reddish light of the sunset, a mud-spattered jeep painted in the colors of camouflage gradually came into view to the right of the bar, emerging from invisibility like an optical illusion. The jeep seemed to have floated out of the trees behind it, to be a part of them.

I heard low male voices, which stopped when I stepped onto the soft boards of the front porch. I glanced at the jeep, looking for insignia or identification, but the mud covered the door panels. Something white gleamed dully from the back seat. When I looked more closely, I saw in a coil of rope an oval of bone that it took me a moment to recognize as the top of a painstakingly cleaned and bleached human skull.

Before I could reach the handle, the door opened. A boy named Mike stood before me, in loose khaki shorts and a dirty white shirt much too large for him. Then he saw who I was. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. Tim. Okay. You can come in.” His real name was not Mike, but Mike was what it sounded like. He carried himself with an odd defensive alertness, and he shot me a tight, uncomfortable smile. “Far table, right side.”

“It’s okay?” I asked, because everything about him told me that it wasn’t. “Yesss.” He stepped back to let me in.

I smelled cordite before I saw the other men. The bar looked empty, and the band of light coming in through the opening over the windows had already reached the long mirror, creating a bright dazzle, a white fire. I took a couple of steps inside, and Mike moved around me to return to his post.

“Oh, hell,” someone said from off to my left. “We have to put up with this?”

I turned my head to look into the murk of that side of the bar, and saw three men sitting against the wall at a round table. None of the kerosene lamps had been lighted yet, and the dazzle from the mirror made the far reaches of the bar even less distinct.

“Is okay, is okay,” said Mike. “Old customer. Old friend.”

“I bet he is,” the voice said. “Just don’t let any women in here.”

“No women,” Mike said. “No problem.”

I went through the tables to the furthest one on the right.

“You want whiskey, Tim?” Mike asked.

“Tim?” the man said. “Tim?”

“Beer,” I said, and sat down.

A nearly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, three glasses, and about a dozen cans of beer covered the table before them. The soldier with his back against the wall shoved aside some of the beer cans so that I could see the .45 next to the Johnnie Walker bottle. He leaned forward with a drunk’s guarded coordination. The sleeves had been ripped off his shirt, and dirt darkened his skin as if he had not bathed in years. His hair had been cut with a knife, and had once been blond.

“I just want to make sure about this,” he said. “You’re not a woman, right? You swear to that?”

“Anything you say,” I said.

“No woman walks into this place.” He put his hand on the gun. “No nurse. No wife. No anything. You got that?”

“Got it,” I said. Mike hurried around the bar with my beer.

“Tim. Funny name. Tom, now—that’s a name. Tim sounds like a little guy— like him. He pointed at Mike with his left hand, the whole hand and not merely the index finger, while his right still rested on the .45. “Little fucker ought to be wearing a dress. Hell, he practically is wearing a dress.”

Don t you like women?” I asked. Mike put a can of Budweiser on my table and shook his head rapidly, twice. He had wanted me in the club because he was afraid the drunken soldier was going to shoot him, and now I was just making things worse.

I looked at the two men with the drunken officer. They were dirty and exhausted—whatever had happened to the drunk had also happened to them. The difference was that they were not drunk yet.

That is a complicated question,” the drunk said. “There are questions of responsibility. You can be responsible for yourself. You can be responsible for your children and your tribe. You are responsible for anyone you want to protect. But can you be responsible for women? If so, how responsible?”

Mike quietly moved behind the bar and sat on a stool with his arms out of sight. I knew he had a shotgun under there.

“You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you, Tim, you rear-echelon dipshit?”

“You’re afraid you’ll shoot any women who come in here, so you told the bartender to keep them out.”

“This wise-ass sergeant is personally interfering with my state of mind,” the drunk said to the burly man on his right. “Tell him to get out of here, or a certain degree of unpleasantness will ensue. ”

“Leave him alone,” the other man said. Stripes of dried mud lay across his lean, haggard face.

The drunken officer Beret startled me by leaning toward the other man and speaking in a clear, carrying Vietnamese. It was an old-fashioned, almost literary Vietnamese, and he must have thought and dreamed in it to speak it so well. He assumed that neither I nor the Montagnard boy would understand him.

This is serious, he said, and I am serious. If you wish to see how serious, just sit in your chair and do nothing. Do you not know of what I am capable by now? Have you learned nothing? You know what I know. I know what you know. A great heaviness is between us. Of all the people in the world at this moment, the only ones I do not despise are already dead, or should be. At this moment, murder is weightless.

There was more, and I cannot swear that this was exactly what he said, but it’s pretty close. He may have said that murder was empty.

Then he said, in that same flowing Vietnamese that even to my ears sounded as stilted as the language of a third-rate Victorian novel: Recall what is in our vehicle (carriage) ; you should remember what we have brought with us, because I shall never forget it. Is it so easy for you to forget?

It takes a long time and a lot of patience to clean and bleach bone. A skull would be more difficult than most of a skeleton.

Your leader requires more of this nectar, he said, and rolled back in his chair, looking at me with his hand on his gun.

“Whiskey,” said the burly soldier. Mike was already pulling the bottle off the shelf. He understood that the officer was trying to knock himself out before he would find it necessary to shoot someone.

For a moment I thought that the burly soldier to his right looked familiar. His head had been shaved so close he looked bald, and his eyes were enormous above the streaks of dirt. A stainless-steel watch hung from a slot in his collar. He extended a muscular arm for the bottle Mike passed him while keeping as far from the table as he could. The soldier twisted off the cap and poured into all three glasses. The man in the center immediately drank all the whiskey in his glass and banged the glass down on the table for a refill.

The haggard soldier who had been silent until now said, “Something is gonna happen here.” He looked straight at me. “Pal?”

“That man is nobody’s pal,” the drunk said. Before anyone could stop him, he snatched up the gun, pointed it across the room, and fired. There was a flash of fire, a huge explosion, and the reek of cordite. The bullet went straight through the soft wooden wall, about eight feet to my left. A stray bit of light slanted through the hole it made.

For a moment I was deaf. I swallowed the last of my beer and stood up. My head was ringing.

“Is it clear that I hate the necessity for this kind of shit?” said the drunk. “Is that much understood?”

The soldier who had called me pal laughed, and the burly soldier poured more whiskey into the drunk’s glass. Then he stood up and started coming toward me. Beneath the exhaustion and the stripes of dirt, his face was taut with anxiety. He put himself between me and the man with the gun.

“I am not a rear-echelon dipshit,” I said. “I don’t want any trouble, but people like him do not own this war.”

“Will you maybe let me save your ass, Sergeant?” he whispered. “Major Bachelor hasn’t been anywhere near white men in three years, and he’s having a little trouble readjusting. Compared to him, we’re all rear-echelon dipshits.”

I looked at his tattered shirt. “Are you his babysitter, Captain?”

He gave me an exasperated look, and glanced over his shoulder at the Major. “Major, put down your damn weapon. The sergeant is a combat soldier. He is on his way back to camp. ”

I don’t care what he is, the Major said in Vietnamese.

The Captain began pulling me toward the door, keeping his body between me and the other table. I motioned for Mike to come out with me.

“Don’t worry, the Major won’t shoot him, Major Bachelor loves the Yards,” the Captain said. He gave me an impatient glance because I had refused to move at his pace. Then I saw him notice my pupils. “God damn,” he said, and then he stopped moving altogether and said “God damn” again, but in a different tone of voice.

I started laughing.

“Oh, this is—” He shook his head. “This is really—”

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

John Ransom turned to the table. “Hey, I know this guy. He’s an old football friend of mine.”

Major Bachelor shrugged and put the .45 back on the table. His eyelids had nearly closed. “I don’t care about football,” he said, but he kept his hand off the weapon.

“Buy the sergeant a drink,” said the haggard officer.

“Buy the fucking sergeant a drink,” the Major chimed in.

John Ransom quickly moved to the bar and reached for a glass, which the confused Mike put into his hand. Ransom went through the tables, filled his glass and mine, and carried both back to join me.

We watched the Major’s head slip down by notches toward his chest. When his chin finally reached the unbuttoned top of his ruined shirt, Ransom said, “All right, Bob,” and the other man slid the .45 out from under the Major’s hand. He pushed it beneath his belt.

“The man is out,” Bob said.

Ransom turned back to me. “He was up three days straight with us, God knows how long before that.” Ransom did not have to specify who he was. “Bob and I got some sleep, trading off, but he just kept on talking.” He fell into one of the chairs at my table and tilted his glass to his mouth. I sat down beside him.

For a moment no one in the bar spoke. The line of light from the open space across the windows had already left the mirror, and was now approaching the place on the wall that meant it would soon disappear. Mike lifted the cover from one of the lamps and began trimming the wick.

“How come you’re always fucked up when I see you?”

“You have to ask?”

He smiled. He looked very different from when I had seen him preparing to give a sales pitch to Senator Burrman at Camp White Star. His body had thickened and hardened, and his eyes had retreated far back into his head. He seemed to me to have moved a long step nearer the goal I had always seen in him than when he had given me the zealot’s word about stopping the spread of Communism. This man had taken in more of the war, and that much more of the war was inside him now.

“I got you off graves registration at White Star, didn’t I?”

I agreed that he had.

“What did you call it, the body squad? It wasn’t even a real graves registration unit, was it?” He smiled and shook his head. “I took care of your Captain McCue, too—he was using it as a kind of dumping ground. I don’t know how he got away with it as long as he did. The only one with any training was that sergeant, what’s his name. Italian.”

“DeMaestro.”

Ransom nodded. “The whole operation was going off the rails.” Mike lit a big kitchen match and touched it to the wick of the kerosene lamp. “I heard some things—” He slumped against the wall and swallowed whiskey. I wondered if he had heard about Captain Havens. He closed his eyes. “Some crazy stuff went on back there.”

I asked if he was still stationed in the highlands up around the Laotian border. He almost sighed when he shook his head.

“You’re not with the tribesmen anymore? What were they, Khatu?”

He opened his eyes. “You have a good memory. No, I’m not there anymore.” He considered saying more, but decided not to. He had failed himself. “I’m kind of on hold until they send me up around Khe Sahn. It’ll be better up there—the Bru are tremendous. But right now, all I want to do is take a bath and get into bed. Any bed. Actually, I’d settle for a dry level place on the ground.”

“Where did you come from now?”

“Incountry.” His face creased and he showed his teeth. The effect was so unsettling that I did not immediately realize that he was smiling. “Way incountry. We had to get the Major out.”

“Looks more like you had to pull him out, like a tooth.”

My ignorance made him sit up straight. “You mean you never heard of him? Franklin Bachelor?”

And then I thought I had, that someone had mentioned him to me a long time ago.

“In the bush for years. Bachelor did stuff that ordinary people don’t even dream of—he’s a legend.”

A legend, I thought. Like the Green Berets Ransom had mentioned a lifetime ago at White Star.

“Ran what amounted to a private army, did a lot of good work in Darlac Province. He was out there on his own. The man was a hero. That’s straight. Bachelor got to places we couldn’t even get close to—he got inside an NVA encampment, you hear me, inside the encampment and silently killed about an entire division.”

Of all the people in the world at this minute, I remembered, the only ones he did not detest were already dead. I thought I must have heard it wrong.

“He was absorbed right into Rhade life,” Ransom said. I could hear the awe in his voice. “The man even got married. Rhade ceremony. His wife went with him on missions. I hear she was beautiful.”

Then I knew where I had heard of Franklin Bachelor before. He had been a captain when Ratman and his platoon had run into him after a private named Bobby Swett had been blown to pieces on a trail in Darlac Province. Ratman had thought his wife was a black-haired angel.

And then I knew whose skull lay wound in rope in the back seat of the jeep.

“I did hear of him,” I said. “I knew someone who met him. The Rhade woman, too. ”

“His wife,” Ransom said.

I asked him where they were taking Bachelor.

“We’re stopping overnight at Crandall for some rest. Then we hop to Tan Son Nhut and bring him back to the States—Langley. I thought we might have to strap him down, but I guess we’ll just keep pouring whiskey into him.”

“He’s going to want his gun back.”

“Maybe I’ll give it to him.” His look told me what he thought Major Bachelor would do with his .45, if he was left alone with it long enough. “He’s in for a rough time at Langley. There’ll be some heat.”

“Why Langley?”

‘Don’t ask. But don’t be naive, either. Don’t you think they’re . . ."He would not finish that sentence. “Why do you think we had to bring him out in the first place?”

“Because something went wrong.”

“Oh, everything went wrong. Bachelor went totally out of control. He had his own war. Ran a lot of sidelines, some of which were supposed to be under shall we say tighter controls?”

He had lost me.

Ventures into Laos. Business trips to Cambodia. Sometimes he wound up in control of airfields Air America was using, and that meant he was in control of the cargo. ”

When I shook my head, he said, “Don’t you have a little something in your pocket? A little package?”

A secret world—inside this world, another, secret world.

You understand, I don t care what he did any more than I care about what you do. I think Langley can go fuck itself. Bachelor wrote the book. In spite of his sidelines. In spite of whatever trouble he got into. The man was effective. He stepped over a boundary, maybe a lot of boundaries—but tell me that you can do what we’re supposed to do without stepping over boundaries.”

I wondered why he seemed to be defending himself, and asked if he would have to testify at Langley.

“It's not a trial.”

“A debriefing.”

“Sure, a debriefing. They can ask me anything they want. All I can tell them is what I saw. That’s my evidence, right? What I saw? They don’t have any evidence, except maybe this, uh, these human remains the Major insisted on bringing out.” For a second, I wished that I could see the sober shadowy gentlemen of Langley, Virginia, the gentlemen with slicked-back hair and pinstriped suits, question Major Bachelor. They thought they were serious men.

“It was like Bong To, in a funny way.” Ransom waited for me to ask. When I did not, he said, “A ghost town, I mean. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Bong To.”

“My unit was just there.” His head jerked up. “A mortar round scared us into the village.”

“You saw the place?”

I nodded.

“Funny story.” Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it. “Well, think about Bachelor, now. I think he must have been in Cambodia or someplace, doing what he does, when his village was overrun. He comes back and finds everybody dead, his wife included. I mean, I don’t think Bachelor killed those people—they weren’t just dead, they’d been made to beg for it. So Bachelor wasn’t there, and his assistant, a Captain Bennington, must have just run off—we never did find him. Officially, Bennington’s MIA. It’s simple. You can’t find the main guy, so you make sure he can see how mad you are when he gets back. You do a little grievous bodily harm on his people. They were not nice to his wife, Tim, to her they were especially not nice. What does he do? He buries all the bodies in the village graveyard, because that’s a sacred responsibility. Don’t ask me what else he does, because you don’t have to know this, okay? But the bodies are buried. Generally speaking. Captain Bennington never does show up. We arrive and take Bachelor away. But sooner or later, some of the people who escaped are going to come back to that village. They’re going to go on living there. The worst thing in the world happened to them in that place, but they won’t leave. Eventually, other people in their family will join them, if they’re still alive, and the terrible thing will be a part of their lives. Because it is not thinkable to leave your dead.”

“But they did in Bong To,” I said.

“In Bong To, they did.”

I saw the look of regret on his face again, and said that I wasn’t asking him to tell me any secrets.

“It’s not a secret. It’s not even military. ”

“It’s just a ghost town.”

Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and around in his hands before he drank. “I have to get the Major into camp.”

“It’s a real ghost town,” I said. “Complete with ghosts.”

“I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.” He drank what was left in his glass and stood up. He had decided not to say any more about it. “Let’s take care of Major Bachelor, Bob,” he said.

“Right.”

Ransom carried our bottle to the bar and paid Mike. I stepped toward him to do the same, and Ransom said, “Taken care of.”

There was that phrase again—it seemed I had been hearing it all day, and that its meaning would not stay still.

Ransom and Bob picked up the Major between them. They were strong enough to lift him easily. Bachelor’s greasy head rolled forward. Bob put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own pocket. Together they carried the Major to the door.

I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It was dark now, and light from the lanterns spilled out through the gaps in the windows.

All of us went down the rotting steps, the Major bobbing between the other two.

Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the Major into the back seat. Bob squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.

John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for the next part of his job.

“I’ll give you a ride back to camp,” he said. “We don’t want an MP to get a close look at you.”

I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backwards. “You know why that mortar round came in, don’t you?” he asked me. He grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of camp. “He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a Lieutenant went straight for the place instead.” He was still grinning. “It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of round-eyes going in there. ”

“He didn’t send in any more fire.”

“No. He didn’t want to damage the place. It’s supposed to stay the way it is. I don't think they’d use the word, but that village is supposed to be like a kind of monument.” He glanced at me again. “To shame.’

For some reason, all I could think of was the drunken Major in the seat behind me, who had said that you were responsible for the people you wanted to protect. Ransom said, “Did you go into any of the huts? Did you see anything unusual there?”

“I went into a hut. I saw something unusual.”

“A list of names?”

“I thought that’s what they were.”

“Okay,” Ransom said. “You know a little Vietnamese?”

“A little.”

“You notice anything about those names?”

I could not remember. My Vietnamese had been picked up in bars and markets, and was almost completely oral.

“Four of them were from a family named Trang. Trang was the village chief, like his father before him, and his grandfather before him. Trang had four daughters. As each one got to the age of six or seven, he took them down into that underground room and chained them to the posts and raped them. A lot of those huts have hidden storage areas, but Trang must have modified his after his first daughter was born. The funny thing is, I think everybody in the village knew what he was doing. I’m not saying they thought it was okay, but they let it happen. They could pretend they didn’t know: the girls never complained, and nobody every heard any screams. I guess Trang was a good-enough chief. When the daughters got to sixteen, they left for the cities. Sent back money, too. So maybe they thought it was okay, but I don’t think they did, myself, do you?”

“How would I know? But there’s a man in my platoon, a guy from—”

“I think there’s a difference between private and public shame. Between what’s acknowledged and what is not acknowledged. That’s what Bachelor has to cope with, when he gets to Langley. Some things are acceptable, as long as you don’t talk about them.” He looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. “Because the way I see it, this is a whole general issue. The issue is: what is expressible? This goes way beyond the tendency of people to tolerate thoughts, actions, or behavior they would otherwise find unacceptable.”

I had never heard a soldier speak this way before. It was a little bit like being back in Berkeley.

“I’m talking about the difference between what is expressed and what is described,” Ransom said. “A lot of experience is unacknowledged. Religion lets us handle some of the unacknowledged stuff in an acceptable way. But suppose—just suppose—that you were forced to confront extreme experience directly, without any mediation?”

“I have,” I said. “You have, too.”

“More extreme than combat, more extreme than terror. Something like that happened to the Major: he encountered God. Demands were made upon him. He had to move out of the ordinary, even as he defined it. ”

Ransom was telling me how Major Bachelor had wound up being brought to Camp Crandall with his wife’s skull, but none of it was clear to me.

“I’ve been learning things,” Ransom told me. He was almost whispering. “Think about what would make all the people of a village pick up and leave, when sacred obligation ties them to that village.”

“I don’t know the answer,” I said.

“An even more sacred obligation, created by a really spectacular sense of shame. When a crime is too great to live with, the memory of it becomes sacred. Becomes the crime itself—”

I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut’s basement had been a shrine to an obscene deity.

“Here we have this village and its chief. The village knows but does not know what the chief has been doing. They are used to consulting and obeying him. Then—one day, a little boy disappears.”

My heart gave a thud.

“A little boy. Say: three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young to take care of himself. He’s just gone—poof. Well, this is Vietnam, right? You turn your back, your kid wanders away, some animal gets him. He could get lost in the jungle and wander into a claymore. Someone like you might even shoot him. He could fall into a boobytrap and never be seen again. It could happen.

“A couple of months later, it happens again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go? This time they really look, not just Mom and Grandma, all their friends. They scour the village. The villagers scour the village, every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice paddy, and then they look through the forest.

“And guess what happens next. This is the interesting part. An old woman goes out one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees a ghost. This old lady is part of the extended family of the first lost kid, but the ghost she sees isn’t the kid’s—it’s the ghost of a disreputable old man from another village, a drunkard, in fact. A local no-good, in fact. He’s just standing near the well with his hands together, he’s hungry—that’s what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old bastard wants more. He wants to be fed. The old lady gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again, the ghost is gone.

“Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole village gets in a panic. Evil forces have been set loose. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who died when they were ten—she’s about six feet away from them. Her hair is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. She used to be a friendly old lady, but she doesn’t look too friendly now. She’s hungry too, like all ghosts. They start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down, and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does? She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl’s face, and licks the tears and slobber off her fingers.

“The next night, another little boy disappears. Two men go looking around the village latrine behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chief s hut. Among them are a sister who died during the war with the French and a twenty-year-old first wife who died of dengue fever. They want to eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead wife, who looks something like what we could call a vampire, he saw her pass into the chief s hut without the benefit of the door.

“These people believe in ghosts, Underhill, they know ghosts exist, but it is extremely rare for them to see these ghosts. And these people are like psychoanalysts, because they do not believe in accidents. Every event contains meaning.

“The dead twenty-year-old wife comes back out through the wall of the chiefs hut. Her hands are empty but dripping with red, and she is licking them like a starving cat.

“The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts. They are as afraid of what they’re thinking as they are of all the ghosts moving around them. The ghosts are part of what they know they know, even though most of them have never seen one until now. What is going through their minds is something new: new because it was hidden.

“The mothers and grandmothers go to the chiefs door and begin howling like dogs. When the chief comes out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what they find. They found the end of Bong To.”

Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.

“But what happened?” I asked. “How did you hear about it?”

He shrugged. “We learned all this in interrogation. When the women found the underground room, they knew the chief had forced the boys into sex, and then killed them. They didn't know what he had done with the bodies, but they knew he had killed the boys. The next time the VC paid one of their courtesy calls, they told the cadre leader what they knew. The VC did the rest. They were disgusted— Trang had betrayed them, too—betrayed everything he was supposed to represent. One of the VC we captured took the chief downstairs into his underground room and chained the man to the posts, wrote the names of the dead boys and Trang’s daughters on the padding that covered the walls, and then . . . then they did what they did to him. They probably carried out the pieces and threw them into the excrement-pit. And over months, bit by bit, not all at once but slowly, everybody in the village moved out. By that time, they were seeing ghosts all the time. They had crossed a kind of border.”

“Do you think they really saw ghosts?” I asked him. “I mean, do you think they were real ghosts?”

“If you want an expert opinion, you'd have to ask Major Bachelor. He has a lot to say about ghosts.” He hesitated for a moment, and then leaned over to open my door. “But if you ask me, sure they did.”

I got out of the jeep and closed the door.

Ransom peered at me through the jeep’s window. “Take better care of yourself.”

“Good luck with your Bru.”

“The Bru are fantastic.” He slammed the jeep into gear and shot away, cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took off to wherever he was going.

Two weeks later Leonard Hamnet managed to get the Lutheran chaplain at Crandall to write a letter to the Tin Man for him, and two days after that he was in a clean uniform, packing up his kit for an overnight flight to an Air Force base in California. From there he was connecting to a Memphis flight, and from there the Army had booked him onto a six-passenger puddlejumper to Lookout Mountain.

When I came into Hamnet’s tent he was zipping his bag shut in a zone of quiet afforded him by the other men. He did not want to talk about where he was going or the reason he was going there, and instead of answering my questions about his flights, he unzipped a pocket on the side of his bag and handed me a thick folder of airline tickets.

I looked through them and gave them back. “Hard travel,” I said.

“From now on, everything is easy,” Hamnet said. He seemed rigid and constrained as he zipped the precious tickets back into the bag. By this time his wife’s letter was a rag held together with scotch tape. I could picture him reading and rereading it, for the thousandth or two thousandth time, on the long flight over the Pacific.

“They need your help,” I said. “I'm glad they’re going to get it.”

“That’s right.” Hamnet waited for me to leave him alone.

Because his bag seemed heavy, I asked about the length of his leave. He wanted to get the tickets back out of the bag rather than answer me directly, but he forced himself to speak. “They gave me seven days. Plus travel time.”

“Good,” I said, meaninglessly, and then there was nothing left to say, and we both knew it. Hamnet hoisted his bag off his bunk and turned to the door without any of the usual farewells and embraces. Some of the other men called to him, but he seemed to hear nothing but his own thoughts. I followed him outside and stood beside him in the heat. Hamnet was wearing a tie and his boots had a high polish. He was already sweating through his stiff khaki shirt. He would not meet my eyes. In a minute a jeep pulled up before us. The Lutheran chaplain had surpassed himself.

“Goodbye, Leonard,” I said, and Hamnet tossed his bag in back and got into the jeep. He sat up straight as a statue. The private driving the jeep said something to him as they drove off, but Hamnet did not reply. I bet he did not say a word to the stewardesses, either, or to the cab drivers or baggage handlers or anyone else who witnessed his long journey home.

On the day after Leonard Hamnet was scheduled to return, Lieutenant Joys called Michael Poole and myself into his quarters to tell us what had happened back in Tennessee. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand, and he seemed both angry and embarrassed. Hamnet would not be returning to the platoon. It was a little funny. Well, of course it wasn t funny at all. The whole thing was terrible—that was what it was. Someone was to blame, too. Irresponsible decisions had been made, and we d all be lucky if there wasn’t an investigation. We were closest to the man, hadn’t we seen what was likely to happen? If not, what the hell was our excuse?

Didn’t we have any inkling of what the man was planning to do?

Well, yes, at the beginning, Poole and I said. But he seemed to have adjusted.

We have stupidity and incompetence all the way down the line here, said Lieutenant Elijah Joys. Here is a man who manages to carry a semi-automatic weapon through security at three different airports, bring it into a courthouse, and carry out threats he made months before, without anybody stopping him.

I remembered the bag Hamnet had tossed into the back of the jeep; I remembered the reluctance with which he had zipped it open to show me his tickets. Hamnet had not carried his weapon through airport security. He had just shipped it home in his bag and walked straight through customs in his clean uniform and shiny boots.

As soon as the foreman had announced the guilty verdict, Leonard Hamnet had gotten to his feet, pulled the semi-automatic pistol from inside his jacket, and executed Mr. Brewster where he was sitting at the defense table. While people shouted and screamed and dove for cover, while the courthouse officer tried to unsnap his gun, Hamnet killed his wife and his son. By the time he raised the pistol to his own head, the security officer had shot him twice in the chest. He died on the operating table at Lookout Mountain Lutheran Hospital, and his mother had requested that his remains receive burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

His mother. Arlington. I ask you.

That was what the Lieutenant said. His mother. Arlington. I ask you.

A private from Indianapolis named E. W. Burroughs won the six hundred and twenty dollars in the Elijah Fund when Lieutenant Joys was killed by a fragmentation bomb thirty-two days before the end of his tour. After that we were delivered unsuspecting into the hands of Harry Beevers, the Lost Boss, the worst lieutenant in the world. Private Burroughs died a week later, down in Dragon Valley along with Tiano and Calvin Hill and lots of others, when Lieutenant Beevers walked us into a mined field where we spent forty-eight hours under fire between two companies of NVA. I suppose Burroughs' mother back in Indianapolis got the six hundred and twenty dollars.