The Throat Read Free Page A

smiled—we were their soldiers,
after all, protecting their ideals and their money.
    But between the patriots at the front and the relaxed, disillusioned
lifers at the rear, in two rows just aft of first class, was another
group I could not figure out at all. As a group, they were lean,
muscular, short-haired, like soldiers, but they wore Hawaiian shirts
and khaki pants, or blue button-down shirts with crisp blue jeans. They
looked like a college football team at a tenth-year reunion. These men
took no notice of us at all. What language I overheard was bright,
hard-edged military jargon.
    When one of the lifers walked past my seat, stretching his legs
before going to sleep, I touched his wrist and asked him about the men
at the front of the cabin.
    He bent low and squeezed out a single word.
    Greenies?
    We landed at Tan Son Nhut in sunlight that seemed almost visibly dense. When the stewardess
swung open the jet's door and the
astonishing heat rolled in, I felt that my old life had gone forever. I
thought I could smell the polish melting off my buttons. In that moment
I decided not to be afraid of anything until I really had to be—I felt
that it was possible to step away from my childhood. This was the first
of the queer exaltations—the sudden sense of a new freedom—that
sometimes visited me in Vietnam, and which I have never felt elsewhere.
    My orders sent me to Camp White Star, a base in II Corps located
outside of Nha Trang. There I was supposed to join other new members of
my regiment for transport north to Camp Crandall in I Corps. One of the
unexplained glitches not unusual in army life occurred, and the men I
was supposed to join had been sent on ahead of me. I was left awaiting
orders for eight days.
    Every day I reported to a cynical captain named McCue, Hamilton
McCue, who rubbed his square fingers over his babyish pink cheeks and
assigned me to whatever task took his momentary fancy. I moved barrels
from beneath the latrine and poured kerosene into them so old
Vietnamese women could incinerate our shit; I cannibalized broken-down
jeeps for distributor caps, alternators, and working fuel pumps; I
raked stones out of the fifteen square yards of dust in front of the
officers' club. Eventually McCue decided that I was having an unseemly
amount of fun and assigned me to the body squad. The body squad
unloaded corpses from the incoming helicopters, transferred them to the
"morgue" while the paperwork was done, and then loaded them into the
holds of planes going to Tan Son Nhut, where they were flown back to
the States.
    The other seven members of the body squad were serving out their
remaining time in Vietnam. All of them had once been in regular units,
and most of them had re-upped so that they could spend another year in
the field. They were not ordinary people— the regiment had slam-dunked
them into the body squad to get them out of their units.
    Their names were Scoot, Hollyday, di Maestro, Picklock, Ratman,
Attica, and Pirate. They had a generic likeness, being unshaven,
hairy—even Ratman, who was prematurely bald, was hairy—unclean, missing
a crucial tooth or two. Scoot, Pirate, and di Maestro wore tattoos
( BORN TO DIE, DEALERS IN DEATH , and a death's head
suspended over an
umber pyramid, respectively). None of them ever wore an entire uniform.
For the whole of my first day, they did not speak to me, and went about
the business of carrying the heavy body bags from the helicopter to the
truck and from the truck to the "morgue" in a frosty, insulted silence.
    The next day, after Captain McCue told me that my orders still had
not come through and that I should return to the body squad, he asked
me how I was getting on with my fellow workers. That was what he called
them, my "fellow workers."
    "They're full of stories," I said.
    "That's not all they're full of, the way I hear it," he said,
showing two rows of square brown teeth that made his big cheeks look as
if his character were being eroded from