Koko

The men in wheelchairs were gradually overtaken by the crowd. Michael looked around him. All about were familiar faces which at second glance resolved into the faces of strangers. Various large bearded versions of Tim Underhill were moving toward the grassy bowl, also several wiry Denglers and Spitalnys. A beaming, round-faced Spanky Burrage slapped the palm of a black man in a Special Forces hat. Poole wondered what had happened to the dap, the complicated series of handgrips that blacks in Vietnam used to greet one another. There had been a wonderful mixture of seriousness and poker-faced hilarity about daps.

People streamed down into the bowl. Old women and babies clutched tiny flags. To Michael’s right, two young men on crutches were followed by an old gaffer, his bald head factory-white, with a row of medals pinned above the left pocket of his plaid shirt. Beside him a florid septuagenarian in a VFW garrison cap struggled with a shiny four-sided walker. Poole looked into the face of every man roughly his own age, and found most of them looking back at him – a crossfire of frustrated recognitions. He took a step forward across the trampled grass and looked straight ahead.

The Memorial was a long, intermittently visible line of sheer black tying together the heads and bodies of the people before it. Men ranged all along its top, walking along over its crew cut of grass as if pacing it off. Others lay down and leaned over to trace names engraved in the polished stone. Poole moved several steps forward, the crowded bowl in front of him widened and fell away, and the entire scene stood before him.

The huge broken black wing of the Memorial was surrounded by people without being engulfed by them. Poole imagined that it would take a lot to engulf this Memorial. Pictures had not quite conveyed its scale. Its strength came from its mass. Only inches high at the tapered ends, it rose to more than twice the height of a man at its folded center. Separated from it by a foot or so of earth already sprouting little flags, letters pinned to sticks, wreaths, and photographs of the dead, a sloping path of granite blocks ran its length.

The people before this emphatic scar in the earth passed slowly before the increasingly tall panels. Now and then they paused to lean forward and touch a name. Michael saw a lot of embraces. A skinnier version of an unloved basic training sergeant was inserting a handful of small red poppies one by one into the cracks between the panels. From immediately in front of the Memorial, a large wedge-shaped crowd fanned upward into the grassy bowl. A dense impacted wave of emotion came from all of these people.

Here was what was left of the war. The Vietnam War consisted of the names etched into the Memorial and the crowd either passing back and forth before those names or standing looking at them. For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place – Vietnam was many thousands of miles distant, with an embattled history and an idiosyncratic and inaccessible culture. Its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not Vietnam; that was here, in these American names and faces.

The ghost-Underhill had appeared beside Michael again, kneading one beefy shoulder with bloody fingers – bright smears of insect blood across his tanned skin. Ah, Lady Michael, they’re all good folks, they just let themselves get messed up by the war, that’s all. A dry chuckle. We didn’t do that, did we, Lady Michael? We tend to be above it all, don’t we? Tell me we do.

I thought I saw you smash in a car to get to a parking space, Poole said to this imaginary Tim Underhill.

I only smash up cars on paper.

Underhill, did you kill those people in Singapore and Bangkok? Did you put the Koko cards on their bodies?

I don’t think you’d better pin that one on me, Lady Michael.

‘Airborne!’ someone shouted.

‘Airborne all the way!’ someone else shouted back.

Poole worked his way closer to the Memorial through the mostly stationary crowd. The sergeant who looked like his old sergeant from Fort Sill was now slipping the tiny red poppies into the crack between the last two tall panels. Protruding from between the panels, the little poppies reflected twice, so that two black shadows lay behind each red dart. A big wild-haired man held up a Texas-sized flag with a waving golden fringe. Poole stepped up beside a Mexican family posted directly beside the granite walk and for the first time saw the reflection in the tall black panel. Mirrored people streamed before him. The reflections of the Mexican family, a man and a woman, a pair of teenage girls, and a small boy holding a flag, all stared at the same spot on the wall. Between them, the reflected parents held a framed photograph of a young Marine. Poole’s own uptilted head seemed, like the others, to be searching for a specific name. Then, as in an optical illusion, the real Poole saw names leap out from the black wall. Donald Z. Pavel, Melvin O. Elvan, Dwight T. Pouncefoot. He looked at the next panel. Art A. McCartney, Cyril P. Downtain, Masters J. Robinson, Billy Lee Barnhart, Paul P. J. Bedrock. Howard X. Hoppe. Bruce G. Hyssop. All the names seemed strange and familiar, in equal measure.

Someone behind him said ‘Alpha Papa Charlie,’ and Michael turned his head, his ears tingling. Now people completely filled the shallow bowl. They covered the rise behind it. Alpha Papa Charlie. Without asking, there was no way of telling which of the men, white-haired, bald, pony-tailed, with faces clear and pockmarked, seamed and scarred, electric with feeling, had spoken. From a huddle of four or five men in jungle hats and green jackets came another, rougher voice saying ‘…lost him outside Da Nang.’

Da Nang. That was in I Corps, his Vietnam. For a moment or two there Poole could not move his arms or legs. Into him streamed place names he had not remembered for fourteen years – Chu Lai, Tarn Ky. Poole saw a narrow dirt alleyway behind a row of huts; he smelled the clumps of drying marijuana hanging from the ceiling of a lean-to where a mamasan with the irresistible name of Si Van Vo lived and prospered. The Dragon Valley, oh God. Phu Bai, LZ Sue, Hue, Quang Tri. Alpha Papa Charlie. On the other side of a collection of thatched huts a line of water buffalos moved across a mud plain toward a mountain trail. Millions of bugs darkened the humid air. Marble Mountain. All those charming little places between the Annamese Cordillera and the South China Sea, where the dead SP4 Cotton, killed by a sniper named Elvis, had lazily spun in frothing pink water. The A Shau Valley: yea, though I walk…

Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley, I shall fear no evil. Michael could see M. O. Dengler bouncing along a high narrow trail, grinning over his shoulder at him, blivets and ammunition strung across his back. On the other side of Dengler’s joyous face was a green, unfolding landscape of unbelievable depth and delicacy, plunging thousands of feet into mists, shading into dozens of different shades of green and rolling on all the way to a green, heavenly infinity. You been bad? Dengler had just asked him. If you haven’t, you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Yea, though I walk through the A Shau Valley…

Poole finally realized he was weeping.

‘Polish on both sides, yeah,’ said an old woman’s voice quite near him. Poole wiped his eyes, but they filled again, so quickly he saw nothing but colorful blurs. ‘Whole neighborhood was Polish, both sides, up and down. Tom’s father was in the Big One, but the emphysema kept him home today.’ Poole took his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to his eyes and tried to bring his crying under control. ‘I said, old man, you can do what you like but nothin’ is gonna keep me away from DC, come Veteran’s Day. Don’t you worry, son, nobody here minds if you cry your eyes out.’

Poole slowly realized that this last comment had been directed at him. He lowered his handkerchief. An obese white-haired woman in her sixties was looking at him with grand-motherly concern. Next to her stood a black man in a faded Special Forces jacket, an Anzac hat astride an unruly Afro.

‘Thanks,’ Poole said. ‘This thing’ – he gestured behind him at the Memorial – ‘finally got to me.’

The black ex-soldier nodded.

‘Actually, I heard somebody say something, can’t even remember what it was now…’

‘Yeah, me too,’ said the black man. ‘I heard somebody say “about twenty klicks from An Khe,” and I…my damn stomach just disappeared.’

‘I I Corps,’ Michael said. ‘You were a little south of me. Name’s Michael Poole, nice to meet you.’

‘Bill Pierce.’ The two men shook hands. ‘This lady here is Florence Majeski. Her son was in my unit.’

Poole had a strong, sudden desire to put his arms around the old woman, but he knew that he would break down again if he did that. He asked the first question that came to mind: ‘You get that hat off an ARVN?’

Pierce grinned. ‘Snatched it right off, riding by in a jeep. Poor little bastard.’

Then he knew what he really wanted to ask Pierce. ‘How can you find the names you’re looking for, in all this crowd?’

‘There’s Marines at both ends of the Memorial,’ Pierce said, ‘and they have books with all the names and the panels they’re on. Or you could ask one of the yellow caps. They’re just here today, on account of all the extra people.’ Pierce glanced at Mrs Majeski.

‘They had Tom right there in the book,’ the old lady said.

‘I see one over thataway,’ Pierce said, pointing off to Michael’s right. ‘He’ll find it for you.’ In the midst of a little knot of people, a tall, bearded, young white man in a yellow duckbill cap was consulting sheets in a looseleaf binder and then gesturing toward specific panels.

‘God bless you, son,’ said Mrs Majeski. ‘If you’re ever in Ironton, Pennsylvania, I want you to stop in and pay us a visit.’

‘Good luck,’ Pierce said.

‘Same to both of you.’ He smiled and turned away.

‘I mean it now!’ Mrs Majeski yelled. ‘You stop in and see us!’

Michael waved, and moved toward the man in the yellow cap. At least two dozen people had him circled, and all seemed to be leaning toward him. ‘I can only handle one at a time.’ the man with the cap said in a flat Midwestern voice. ‘Please, okay?’

Poole thought. The others ought to be at the hotel by now. This is a ridiculous gesture.

The young man in the yellow cap consulted his pages, indicated panels, wiped moisture from his forehead. Michael soon stood before him. The volunteer was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt unsnapped halfway down over a damp grey T-shirt. His beard glistened with sweat. ‘Name,’ he said.

‘M. O. Dengler,’ Poole said.

The man riffled through his pages, located the D’s, and ran his finger down a column. ‘Here we go. The only Dengler is Dengler, Manuel Orosco, of Wisconsin. Which happens to be my home state. Panel fourteen west, line fifty-two. Right over there.’ He pointed to the right. Small poppies like red pinpoints dotted the edges of the panel, before which stood a large unmoving crowd. NO MORE VIETNAMS, announced a bright blue banner.

Manuel Orosco Dengler? The Spanish names were a surprise. A sudden thought stopped Michael as he made his way toward the blue banner through the crowd: the guide had given him the wrong Dengler. Then he remembered that the guide had said that this was the only Dengler. And the initials were right. Manuel Orosco had to be his Dengler.

Poole was directly in front of the Memorial once again. His shoulder touched the shoulder of a shaggy-haired, weeping vet with a handlebar moustache. Beside him a woman with white blonde hair to the waist of her blue jeans held the hand of a little girl, also blonde. A child without a father, as he was now forever a father without a child. On the other side of the broken strip of sod, planted with flags and wreaths and photographs of young soldiers stapled to wooden sticks, the four-teenth panel, west, loomed before him. Poole counted down until he reached the fifty-second line. The name of M.O. Dengler, MANUEL OROSCO DENGLER, etched in black polished granite, jumped out at him. Poole admired the surgical dignity of the engraving, the unadorned clarity of the letters. He knew that he had never had any choice about standing in front of Dengler’s name.

Dengler had even liked the C-rations scorned by the others. He claimed the dogfood taste of army turkey loaf, canned in 1945, was better than anything his mother had ever made. Dengler had liked being on patrol. (Hey, I was on patrol the whole time I was a kid.) Heat, cold, and dampness had affected him very little. According to Dengler, rainbows froze to the ground during Milwaukee ice storms and kids ran out of their houses, chipped off pieces of their favorite colors, and licked them until they were white. As for violence and the fear of death, Dengler said that you saw at least as much violence outside the normal Milwaukee tavern as in the average firefight; inside, he claimed, you saw a bit more.

In Dragon Valley, Dengler had fearlessly moved about under fire, dragging the wounded Trotman to Peters, the medic, keeping up a steady, calm, humorous stream of talk. Dengler had known that nothing there would kill him.

Poole stepped forward, careful not to trample on a photograph or a wreath, and ran his fingers over the sharp edges of Dengler’s name, carved into the chill stone.

He had a quick, unhappy, familiar vision of Spitalny and Dengler running together through billowing smoke toward the mouth of the cave at Ia Thuc.

Poole turned away from the wall. His face felt too tight. The blonde woman gave him a sympathetic, wary half-smile and pulled her little girl backwards out of his way.

Poole wanted to see his ex-warriors. Feelings of loneliness and isolation wrapped themselves tightly around him.

2 Message

1

Michael was so certain that a message from his friends would be waiting for him at the hotel that once he got there he marched straight from the revolving door to the desk. Harry Beevers had assured him that he and the others would arrive ‘sometime in the afternoon.’ It was now just before ten minutes to five.

Poole started to scan the wall behind the desk for his messages as soon as he could read the room numbers beneath the pigeonholes. When he was three-fourths of the way across the lobby, he saw one of the white hotel message forms inserted diagonally into his own rectangular box. He immediately felt much less tired. Beevers and the other two had arrived.

Michael stepped up to the desk and caught the clerk’s eye. ‘There’s a message for me.’ he said. ‘Poole, room 204.’ He took the oversize key from his jacket pocket and showed it to the clerk, who began to inspect the wall behind him with an almost maddening lack of haste. At last the clerk found the correct slot and withdrew the message. He glanced at the form as he handed it to Poole, then smiled.

‘Sir.’

Michael took the form, looked first at the name, and turned his back on the clerk to read the message. Tried to call back. Did you really hang up on me? Judy. The time 3:55 was stamped on the form in purple ink – she had called just after Michael had left his room.

He turned around and found the clerk looking at him blankly. ‘I’d like to know if some people who were supposed to be here by now have checked in yet.’

Poole spelled the names.

The clerk slowly pecked at buttons on a computer terminal, frowned, tilted his head, frowned again, and without changing his posture in any way looked sideways at Michael and said, ‘Mr Beevers and Mr Pumo have not arrived as yet. We have no booking for a Mr Linklater.’

Conor was probably saving money by sleeping in Pumo’s room.

Poole turned away, folded Judy’s message into his jacket pocket, and for the first time since his return saw what had happened to the lobby.

Men in dark suits and striped neckties now occupied the banquettes and tables. Most of them had no facial hair and wore white name tags crowded with print. They were talking quietly, consulting legal pads, punching numbers into pocket computers. During his first surreal eighteen months back from Vietnam, Michael Poole had been able to tell if a man had been in Vietnam just by the way he held his body. His instinct for distinguishing vets from civilians had faded since then, but he knew he could not be mistaken about this group.

‘Hello, sir,’ said a clarion voice at his elbow.

Poole looked down at a beaming young woman with a fanatical face surrounded by a bubble of blonde hair. She held a tray of glasses filled with black liquid.

‘Might I inquire, sir, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam conflict?’

‘I was in Vietnam,’ Poole said.

‘The Coca-Cola Company joins the rest of America in thanking you personally for your efforts during the Vietnam conflict. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you, and to introduce you to our newest product, Diet Coke, in the hope that you will enjoy it and will share your pleasure with your friends and fellow veterans.’

Poole looked upward and saw that a long, brilliantly red banner of some material like parachute silk had been suspended far above the lobby. White lettering said: THE COCA-COLA CORPORATION AND DIET COKE SALUTE THE VETERANS OF VIETNAM! He looked back down at the girl.

‘I guess I’ll pass.’

The girl increased the wattage of her smile and looked amazingly like every one of the stewardesses on Poole’s flight into Vietnam from San Francisco. Her eyes shifted away from him, and she was gone.

The desk clerk said, ‘You’ll find your meeting areas downstairs, sir. Perhaps your friends are waiting for you there.’

2

The executives in their blue suits sipped their drinks, pretending not to monitor the girls walking around the lobby with their inhuman smiles and trays of Diet Coke. Michael touched Judy’s note in his jacket pocket. Either it or the tips of his fingers felt hot. If he sat down in the lobby bar to watch the arrivals coming through the door, within minutes he would be asked if he were a veteran of the Vietnam conflict.

Poole went to the bank of elevators and waited while an odd mixture of veterans and Coca-Cola executives, each group pretending the other group did not exist, left the car. Only one other man, a drunken mountainous being in tiger-striped fatigues, entered the elevator with him. The man studied the buttons and pushed SIXTEEN four or five times, then stumbled against the railing at the back of the car. He emitted a foggy bourbon-flavored burp. Poole finally recognized him as the van driver who had smashed into the Camaro.

‘You know this, don’t you?’ the giant asked him. He straightened up and began to bellow out a song Poole and every other veteran knew by heart. ‘Homeward bound, I wish I were homeward bound’…

Poole joined him on the second line, singing softly and tunelessly, and then the car stopped and the door opened. The giant, who had closed his eyes, continued to sing as Poole stepped from brown elevator carpet to green hall carpet. The doors slid shut. The elevator ascended and Poole heard the man’s voice echoing down the shaft.

3 Reunion

1

A North Vietnamese soldier who looked like a twelve-year-old boy stood over Poole, prodding his neck with the barrel of a contraband Swedish machine gun he must have killed someone to get. Poole was pretending he was dead so that the NVA would not shoot him; his eyes were closed, but he had a vivid picture of the soldier’s face. Coarse black hair fell over a broad, unlined forehead. The black eyes and abrupt, almost lipless mouth seemed nearly serene in their lack of expression. When the rifle barrel pushed painfully into his neck, Poole let his head slide fractionally across the greasy earth in what he hoped was a realistic imitation of death. He could not die: he was a father and he had to live. Huge iridescent bugs whirred in the air above his face, their wings clacking like shears.

The tip of the barrel stopped jabbing his neck. An outsized drop of sweat squeezed itself out of Poole’s right eyebrow and trickled into the little depression between the bridge of his nose and the corner of his eye; one of the rusty-sounding insects blundered into his lips. When the N V A did not move on to any of the real corpses near him, Poole knew that he was going to die. His life was over, and he would never know his son, whose name was Robert. Like his love for this unknown son, the knowledge that the soldier was going to blow his head apart here on the narrow field full of dead men was total.

The shot did not come. Another of the rusty insects fell onto his sweat-slick cheek like a spent bullet and took a maddening length of time scrabbling to its legs before it lumbered off.

Then Poole heard a faint click and rustle, as of some object being pulled from a casing. The soldier’s feet moved as he shifted his weight. Poole realized that the man was kneeling beside him. An entirely uncurious hand, the size of a girl’s, pushed his head flat into the smeary earth, then yanked his right ear. His impersonation of a dead man had been too successful – the NVA wanted his ear as a trophy. Poole’s eyes snapped open by themselves, and before them, on the other side of a long grey knife where the sky should have been, hung the motionless black eyes of the other soldier. The North Vietnamese gasped. For a brimming half-second the air filled with the stench of fish sauce.

Poole jackknifed up off his bed and the NVA melted away. The telephone was ringing. The first thing he was fully conscious of was that his son was gone again.

Gone too were the corpses and the lumbering insects. Poole groped for the phone. ‘Mike?’ came tinnily from the receiver. He looked over his shoulder and saw bland pale wallpaper, a painting of a misty Chinese landscape over the bed. He found that he could breathe.

‘This is Michael Poole,’ he said into the receiver.

‘Mikey! How are you? You sound a little weirded-out, man.’ Poole finally recognized the voice of Conor Linklater, who had turned his head away from the telephone and was saying,’ ‘Hey, I got him! He’s in his room! I told you, man, Mike’s just gonna be in his room, remember?’ Then Conor was speaking to him again. ‘Hey, didn’t you get our message, man?’

Conversations with Conor Linklater, Michael was reminded, tended to be more scattered than conversations with most other people. ‘I guess not. What time did you get in?’ He looked at his watch and saw that he had been asleep for half an hour.

‘We got here about four-thirty, man, and we called you right away, and at first they said you weren’t here and Tina made ‘em look twice and then they said you were here, but nobody answered your phone. Okay. How come you didn’t answer our message?’

‘I went out to the Memorial,’ Poole said. ‘I got back a little before five. I was in the middle of a nightmare when you woke me up.’

Conor did not say good-bye and he did not hang up. Speaking more softly than before, he said, ‘Man, you sound like that nightmare really weirded you out.’

A rough hand tugging his ear away from his head; the ground greasy with blood. Poole’s memory gave him the picture of a field where exhausted men carried corpses toward impatient helicopters in the hazy blue light of early morning. Some of the corpses had blood-black holes where they should have had ears. ‘I guess I went back to Dragon Valley,’ Poole said, having just understood this.

‘Be cool,’ Conor Linklater said. ‘We’re already out the door.’ He hung up.

Poole splashed water on his face in the bathroom, roughly used a towel, and examined himself in the mirror. In spite of his nap he looked pale and tired. Megavitamins encased in clear plastic lay on the counter beside his toothbrush, and he peeled one free and swallowed it.