Chapter 2
We meet Neccas…March,
1968…Not Vietnam…Familiar faces…Freedom of The Press…A fucking blood bath…Stop,
drop, and roll…Starving, man…Tom Speed…Disappearing face…Mop-up…Lead and fire…
“He Loves Games? Then let him play for stakes. This, you see here these
ruins, wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be
again? Aye and again, with other people, with other sons.”
***
The reporter had crossed the line, and now there was only
the “when” of it. The LT – his name was Pierce – was straight up Company,
working deep in the rubber when he got the call to My Lai, he said. He’d
debriefed Major Neccas on the fly in between half a hundred other tasks:
This fucking guy’s cashed in his chips. Reporter from the Nation. Stevens or some fucking
thing. The company has given the word. If you get a chance…
Pierce didn’t have to finish, and so he didn’t. Neccas
understood him perfectly. Company business on the battlefield was always complicated
and dangerous, and Maj. Pierce’s obviously capable hands were also quite
obviously full. To Dunc, the guy seemed to be everywhere around them all at
once: He’d started the day going hooch to hooch, directing fire and shouting
warnings and encouragement and bigoted invective. Dunc saw him again minutes
later, quicklime – ing the new dead in a shallow mass grave. There he was
grabbing a shovel, directing the fill-in, throwing dirt over bodies. Next,
directing strike teams to move onward in upward into the valley, shooting down
a young mother, passing her baby to the rear, calling in air support, setting a
hooch on fire, and – now - ordering the expedient assassination of a pencil
whose time had come. Neccas was impressed.
He found the doomed newspaper man Stevens hawking a sheep
Captain from Division, following the poor bastard around the festivities, crying
in the guy's ear on what must have been a shit day already. Neccas could see a gook
family, alone in the open space between the village front and the Company
killing fields, eyeing this pathetic running battle with great interest on
their faces. Duncan listened for a minute, caught the words “Geneva”…”Hostile
intent”…and “atrocity” above the sulfuric hiss of the war-works. Finally Neccas
walked up behind the two of them and tapped the nosy fucker gently on the
elbow. The wielded, tensed and geared up for whatever, then softened visibly
when he found the smiling face of the spook named Duncan Neccas. Dunc showed some
insignia, motioned northward to a hooch some 300 yards distant from the firearm
reports and rotor-wash of the raid. He leaned in and gave the guy’s elbow a
comfy grab, got in his ear:
Let’s walk, I was told to look out for you.
The guy heard, stalled out for a second, rocked on his feet
in the mud, then obeyed, something like understanding creeping into his look.
Dunc didn’t turn, but he was quite certain the gook family would fall in at a
distance. It got quieter halfway to the hooch and the guy started in:
Fuck this is insane. Who commissioned this fucking thing?
It’s a goddamned blood bath. Fucking goddamn BLOOD bath!
Dunc couldn’t resist a little stagecraft. He stopped
walking, turned the guy face to:
I lied about looking out for you. Recognized your face from
the press pool at Hue last year. You’re one of the good guys. That’s why we
gotta be quick.
The guy got smart:
I thought you looked familiar. Let’s double time it. I knew
this was fucked up. I fucking KNEW!
The guy – round and pale and glistening sweaty – started out
toward the hooch in a fake “run” slower than most people walk. It took minutes,
and they were silent the rest of the way. Dunc could hear a flamethrower now,
belching up flat white noise, over burning screams. The reporter had to have
heard it too, Dunc was thinking. Then they were at the hooch, and Stevens went
for the door. Dunc said:
Not inside, they’ll get out here quick. Besides, what you
need to see is out back.
The shithead agreed for the last time in his life, walked
ahead of Dunc and around the rear of the hooch.
Neccas reached into the leather clutch fastened just below
his left arm with a silent, lightning quick sweep of his right hand. When the
pencil wheeled around, the smiling, wholly reassuring face from moments ago had
been replaced by the hellish barrel of a carbon-black, .38 Colt Anaconda.
Neccas said:
Sorry.
and gently squeezed the trigger. The reporter’s eye, and everything behind it, disappeared into a vague red mist. The blowback covered half of Sgt. Neccas’s face with a shiny red slick. He emerged from behind the hooch, saw the gook family about ten yards out, inching across the field. Neccas held up a friendly hand that became a friendly wave when the gook family noticed him. He waved them in, smiling.
Walking back, Neccas found the BT 1050 crew and sent them to
deal with the mess behind the far hooch.
***
Wow. I’m fucking starving man. What’s lunch?
Dunc picked it up from somewhere behind. He was within five
paces of Speed and the LT Pierce, walking and talking, humping towards a shitty
looking buffalo graze to trade c-rats. Sgt. Speed spoke like they were standing
in Washington Square, musing a carefree point just because. The LT answered
back though, and sunk the conversation back deep in the shit, where it
belonged:
Fuck yes. Sun’s brutal. Sporty this morning.
A guy from the old days named Alfonso was somewhere behind
them:
Fuck yes LT. fuck yes Sarnt Speed. Fucking sporty, sir.
My Lai wasn't a village, it was a region in which there were
three or four population centers. The grunts had their orders, mostly play
acting, sending any Vietnamese they could find rearward to the Company boys
after short, loud "interrogation". The operators were working
together as usual. Duncan was overseeing the photogs, Speed was watching the
diggers. Both were keeping corpse count on tiny, army-green notebooks. The
Company boys needed pictures and inventory to get full credit. Six mass graves
dug 10 feet down bounded the tree line south of the the villages. Three were ready
half full after only three hour's work. Duncan had to call up a shovel detail –
Alfonse and two other grunts - from division just to keep up with the flow of
confused cadavers-to-be.
Speed and Pierce was covered head to toe in dark black blood,
as was most of the rest of Charlie. Speed’s pant leg was ripped from ankle to
knee on the right side, and when he walked Neccas could make out a deep gash,
bleeding and oozing onto the butt of a carbon-black pistol strapped to Speed’s
ankle. The cut looked very painful, yet Speed was hurrying along with no
obvious limp or scowl. Just arrived in the 3rd was Sargent Thomas Winchester
Speed, from an Air Cav detachment somewhere in the mountains, “deep in Indian
country” he said. Dunc had asked for him by name, and he’d arrived ten short
hours later. Tom Speed – Neccas knew from hard experience - was the kind of
operator that made everybody around feel a little bit safer.
As for Dunc himself, he wasn’t hungry. Wasn’t anything
really. Bored, maybe. He’d been in-country almost five years – two with the
Marines and three with the Company – and in that time, Dunc Neccas had done a
lot of really awful things. He remembered a time, in the far distant past now,
that the bullshit had some effect on him. Luckily he’d smartened up before fucking up in any kind of mortal way.
The battle field – he’d learned long ago – was no place for reflection, or
questions. Instead, Neccas had learned to trust the people around him, and the
people above him. He studied their weaknesses and strengths, what they were
capable of, and how to make use of them. These days, when the brass needed
body-count in Southeast Asia, they turned to Duncan Neccas.
***
Then, something was happening.
Dunc heard three things all at once: First, the unmistakable
sound of AK-47 rounds coursing through heavy brush from a long way away. Behind
it, there were three quick reports, so closely spaced that the grouping sounded
like one sound - a low, menacing growl – instead of three. Finally, Dunc heard
screaming from somewhere in front of him. The squad - HIS fucking squad - was
taking fire.
Dunc was on the ground instantly, getting small, thinking
about the space around him. He rolled to one side of the single track and
rolled again off a soft shoulder and into giant tee-pee of Cyrus root. He heard
a noise rolling alongside him and felt somebody’s arm brushing by his calf. He
spared a quick look down and confirmed: Alfonse from the old days, he’d hit the
deck but not until taking a few instinctive steps down-trail. He was
practically in Dunc Necass back pocket when the two of them heard the gunfire,
and now they were lying in a big, stationary hunk of green-camouflage. Neccas
hijacked the guy’s attention with a leg kick. The guy looked up, Neccas
commanded:
ROLL!! Far shoulder!!...ROLL ROLL!!…
Alfonse looked, for just an instant, like he might not be so
into the command, but no sooner had the shifty look made manifest, than Dunc
watched it fade again to grim compliance. Neccas watched him roll across, and
he was watching still when another burst of AK fire split the air around them.
There was a sound like a very small rock, falling into calm water from a very
high place, and Alfonse from way back’s head popped like a balloon full of
bright red paint.
Sgt. Neccas took the shot the way a sprinter takes the crack
of a starter’s pistol: he ran as fast as his legs would carry him in the
direction he was facing just before the shots rang out. In a few seconds he
heard the helicopters, charging in low from some place north of him. He said a
silent prayer they’ land near a place where he’d be, and tried to run faster.
The greenery around him was twitching and moving from bullets and down-draft, and Duncan Neccas realized as he ran, that he did not expect to make
it. A wave of panic
broke all around him, and all became suddenly louder. Neccas ran at top speed,
but even as he went, he felt panic grabbing at his legs, dragging him down. He heard voices, felt a blow to his lower back. He fell. He was thinking about his daughter, and the lies they’d
have to tell her.
