Koko Read online

  Tim Underhill had gotten himself back to the Far East as soon as possible after the war and had become a moderately successful crime novelist. M.O. Dengler was killed in a freakish street accident while on R&R in Bangkok with another soldier, named Victor Spitalny, and never returned from Asia at all.

  Oh, Michael Poole missed Underhill. He missed them both, Underhill and Dengler.

  The group of vets behind Michael, as scattered and varied as those before him, gradually caught up with him. He became aware that he was no longer marching alone, but was moving along between the crowds lining both sides of the street with a couple Dengler-sized boonie-rats, fiercely moustached, and an assortment of polyester-suited VFW types.

  As if he had been reading his thoughts, one of the Denglersized boonie-rats walking beside Michael sidled up to him and whispered something. Michael bent down, cupping his ear.

  “I was a hell of a fighter, man,” the little ex-soldier whispered a shade louder. Tears gleamed in his eyes.

  “To tell you the truth,” Michael said, “you remind me of one of the best soldiers I ever knew.”

  “No shit.” The man nodded briskly. “What outfit was you in?”

  Poole named his division and his battalion.

  “What year?” The man cocked his head to check out Poole’s face.

  “ ‘Sixty-eight,’ sixty-nine.”

  “Ia Thuc,” the boonie-rat said immediately. “I remember that. That was you guys, right? Time magazine and all that shit?”

  Poole nodded.

  “Fuckin’-A. They shoulda give that Lieutenant Beevers a fuckin’ Medal of Honor for what he done, and then took it away again for shootin’ off his mouth in front of fuckin’ journalists,” the boonie-rat said, sidling away with an easy fluid motion that would have been noiseless if they had been walking over brittle twigs.

  Two fat women with short fluffy hair, pastel pantsuits, and placid church-picnic faces were rhythmically waving between them a red banner with the stark black letters POW-MIA. A few paces behind marched two youngish ex-soldiers bearing another banner: COMPENSATE FOR AGENT ORANGE. Agent Orange—

  Victor Spitalny had tilted his head and stuck out his tongue, claiming that the stuff tasted good. You motherfuckers, drink it down! This shit’s boo-koo good for your insides! Washington and Spanky Burrage and Trotman, the black soldiers on the detail, cracked up, falling into the thick jungly growth beside the trail, slapping each other on the back and sides, repeating “boo-koo good for your insides” and enraging Spitalny, whom they knew had only been trying, in his stupid way, to be funny. The smell of Agent Orange, halfway between gasoline and industrial solvent, stuck to all of them until sweat and insect repellent and trail grime either covered it up or washed it off.

  Poole caught himself wiping the palms of his hands together, but it was too late to wash away the Agent Orange.

  How does it feel to kill somebody? I can’t tell you because I can’t tell you. I think maybe I got killed myself, but not before I killed my son. You shit in your pants, man, you laugh so hard.

  3

  By the time Michael Poole reached the park, the parade had melted down into a wandering crowd, marchers and onlookers moving together across the grass. Loose, ragged groups streamed over the entire landscape, walking through the sparse trees, filling the whole scene. Though he could not see the Memorial, Michael knew where it was. About a hundred yards before him, the crowds were moving down a grade into a natural bowl from which came the psychic flare of too many people. The Memorial stood at the bottom of all those people. Michael’s scalp tingled.

  A phalanx of men in wheelchairs were pushing themselves across the long stretch of grass before the bowl. One of the chairs tilted over sideways and a gaunt, black-haired, legless man with a shockingly familiar face spilled out. Michael’s heart froze—the man was Harry Beevers. Michael started to run forward to help. Then he checked himself. The fallen man was surrounded by friends, and in any case he could not be Poole’s old lieutenant. Two others righted the chair. They held it steady as the man braced himself on his stumps. Then he pushed himself up onto the metal footrests. The man reached up, grasped the armrests, and with neat gymnastic skill deposited himself in his own seat.

  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.<
br />
  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, Tam 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 mama-san 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 grandmotherly 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.”

  “II 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 his 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 fourteenth 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, t
he 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.

  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.