R&R Page 2

  Nashville had never been to France but he’d heard French women had invented the blowjob, so when he got out of the army – which he hoped would be never – it was top of his list of countries to visit. But Vung Tau was Paris to Nashville. It was the city of his dreams. He looked out over the South China Sea and was happy.

  Bucky pedalled quickly past a GI who had been pulled up by MPs outside a Chinese hotel. Nashville remembered seeing the soldier one night in the Texas Bar, rigidly dancing and haltingly laughing, as if he’d watched a happy man drinking and was straining to mimic him. One of the MPs shoved the GI in the back.

  ‘Fucking pigs,’ muttered Nashville.

  Bucky dropped Nashville ten yards from the provost marshal's office, on a block of Le Loi Street that was just a broad stretch of sand bordered by timber huts and wire fencing. Nashville left him a dollar.

  ‘Americans nambawan,’ said Bucky, and tried to give him an apple tart.

  Mike Hauser from Carthage, Tennessee, stood stiff in the concrete gatehouse, glazed and unalert, like a man buried upright.

  ‘Ha!’ said Hauser. ‘Gotcha!’ He raised his rifle. ‘Captain’s looking for you. What’ve you been up to, you sick motherfucker?’

  ‘Fucking your girl,’ said Nashville.

  The sentry lowered his weapon.

  The Captain had an undimpled jaw and hair that never grew longer, like a soldier doll. He had joined the military because his father had been a soldier and his father before him, all the way back to the Spanish–American War. He was good-humoured and kind, but saw no reason to advertise the fact, and Nashville was the only man who’d noticed. He enjoyed Sherlock Holmes novels, and liked to speak with Nashville about them.

  As he heard Nashville’s footsteps falling towards the PMO, the Captain considered picking up a document and reading it unnecessarily. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the door, as if he watched it all day. Nashville marched in, and stood to attention with slightly more enthusiasm than was warranted.

  The Captain waved at him to relax. Nashville remained still, staring directly at the map of Vung Tau behind the Captain’s head.

  ‘How was your Saigon leave?’ the Captain asked.

  ‘I don’t remember, sir,’ said Nashville.

  The Captain nodded. ‘When did you get back?’ he asked.

  ‘Yesterday, sir,’ said Nashville.

  ‘I didn’t see you around the post,’ said the Captain.

  ‘I hit the rack early, sir,’ said Nashville.

  The Captain picked up his pen. ‘And where were you an hour ago?’ he asked, signing a document which required no signature.

  ‘In the shower, sir.’

  Nashville’s eyelids were greasy, he smelled of cinnamon, and he had lipstick smeared like shaving blood across his chin.

  ‘Sergeant Caution went AWOL,’ said the Captain, eventually, ‘while you were in Saigon. But before he disappeared, he shot a dead Vietnamese national in Le Boudin.’

  Nashville flinched. He hated shootings. ‘He shot him dead?’

  ‘He was already dead,’ said the Captain.

  Nashville raised one eyebrow, a common skill of which he was uncommonly proud.

  ‘I ain’t sure, sir,’ said Nashville, ‘that shooting a dead guy is actually a crime.’

  The Captain tapped his pen. ‘He was dead and he was buried,’ he said. ‘Then he turned up at your buddy’s bar with his ears cut off, like a bait dog.’

  Nashville subconsciously checked both sides of his own head for ears.

  ‘A little before twenty-two hundred on Saturday night,’ said the Captain, ‘Sergeant Caution stumbled in from the street, as drunk as a . . .’ he struggled to find a simile ‘. . . as drunk as you, Nashville. He saw the earless body of the dead gook sitting on a chair wearing some clown’s white fedora, shot it three times, then ran off screaming.’

  The Captain paused, imagining dramatic tension.

  ‘My informants tell me the Mamasan’s got him,’ he said.

  The only part of this story Nashville liked was the bit where Caution had disappeared.

  ‘It was the sergeant’s night off,’ said the Captain. ‘He’d been drinking on post. Hauser had served him until twenty-one hundred, when Caution fell asleep in his seat. Hauser and Simpson hauled him to his hut. Why would he get up again and go to Le Boudin?’

  Nashville affected to ruminate.

  ‘We think the Mamasan set a trap for him,’ said the Captain. ‘She baited him, lured him and caught him.’

  The Captain told Nashville that Nguyễn Van Tran was an old man who’d been killed in a car accident a few days before. He used to sell scorpions on the street for medicinal wines, but he’d hardly been seen since his wife died. He wasn’t VC. He wasn’t RC. He’d had a son fighting for the Communists and another with the Cao Dai, but they were both in the ground. Nguyễn Van Tran had no surviving family so he’d been buried by the coffin maker in a PX box beside the tomb of his ancestors. There was no one left who cared about his life or his death, but the Captain had received complaints related to his brief afterlife from the mayor of Vung Tau, the chief of police and the district commander of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

  ‘The locals believe Sergeant Caution dug up the body,’ said the Captain, ‘then cut off its ears, brought it to the bar and shot it.’

  This seemed likely to Nashville too. The Captain, however, felt otherwise.

  ‘We need to show the gooks this is not the way we operate,’ said the Captain. ‘Find Sergeant Caution, Nashville. Find the Mamasan. Find out what’s going on.’

  Nashville felt he could probably deal with the situation if he just had a chance to lie down.

  ‘One more thing,’ said the Captain. ‘There’s a batch of replacements starting their tour today. Sergeant Caution isn’t here to greet them, the doc’s in Long Binh, and I’ve got visitors coming all the way from General Westmoreland to tell me how to do my job. So I’m leaving it to you to give the opening address, Nashville.’

  Nashville saluted mechanically.

  Outside the Captain’s office, two off-duty police, shirtless, bullied a seabag hanging from a tree. One of the boxers, Simpson from Simpson, had a half-moon scar under his nipple; the other wore a tattoo of an eagle on his arm. When he drove his fist into the bag, the high wing of the eagle twitched. Eagle was the boxer of the two. Simpson from Simpson didn’t even know to wait for the bag to swing still. They had rags tied around their knuckles and Eagle shuffled, kicking up puffs of dust. Simpson from Simpson stood with feet planted like fence posts, as if the bag figured to pass him.

  Eagle saw Nashville watching them, and so increased his pace. The bag crumpled and recovered, veered and swerved. Eagle bit down on his teeth, breathed hard through his nose, sprinkled sweat on the canvas flesh of the dummy, limbless and lynched.

  He looked up at Nashville, as if he’d only then noticed him, and wiped the sweat from his eyes with the wraps on his hands. ‘Want to show us how it’s done?’ he asked. ‘You sick motherfucker.’

  Nashville shook his head.

  ‘Aw, come on,’ said Eagle.

  The air was fat and thick. It made everything heavier. Nashville walked slowly towards them. He felt as if he had a woman with her arms around his waist, and he was pulling her along behind. He judged the bag and measured it, took a small step forward and slipped to the side, feinting like it might flinch.

  ‘Nah,’ he said, and patted the flank. ‘This boy’s too good for me.’

  The Captain watched from his window, although he’d seen it before.

  Eagle offered Nashville a dollar to hit the bag, as if Nashville were one of the street boys who’d fight each other in the market for fifty cents, until the loser couldn’t stand.

  ‘Five,’ said Nashville.

  ‘Five says you can’t,’ said Simpson from Simpson.

  Eagle had lined the bag with torn uniforms, bulging like muscles under the pockets, and packed it with sand.

  Nashville clenched
a fist. His right hand seemed to grow, roused by the curves of his target. When he threw a cross, it rose from his feet, through his hips and into his hand, and came so fast it was almost invisible. Nashville punched every pound of his weight, and twisted his knuckles as they landed, tearing through the fabric of the seabag at the point where it was most worn. The bag burst open, haemorrhaging sand.

  The Captain turned away from his window.

  Eagle pulled a fin from the pocket of his pants.

  Nashville waved him down. ‘Party trick,’ he said. ‘Save your money for a blowjob.’

  Nashville walked away, looking down at the dust so the men would not see his eyes. He bit down on his bottom teeth to keep from roaring. When he had hit the bag, he’d thought of blood and bones.

  He splashed his face with water from his canteen, and marched over to the fucking new guys assembled for guard mount in the sun. All the men looked very young, and they seemed to be wearing one long hat. Nashville squeezed his eyes closed then opened them again. Their helmets separated, but the men themselves became a blur.

  For his speech, Nashville chose a manner which, he believed, integrated the best qualities of a travelling preacher, a charismatic teacher and a fearsome drill sergeant. He saluted the fucking new guys, who saluted Nashville in return. He did this twice, because their response surprised him.

  ‘Welcome to Vung Tau, men,’ he said. There were only half a dozen, but Nashville addressed them as if they were a thousand. ‘Ordinarily, your tour of duty would start with a lecture given by the doc, about the horrors of venereal disease, and another from the sergeant, about the evils of Communism. Since neither man can be with us this morning, I’m going to squeeze their key points into a single speech, entitled “Why Communism is like VD”.’

  Experimentally, he saluted them again. They saluted him back.

  ‘My name,’ said Nashville, ‘is Corporal John Ulysses Grant – widely known as ‘Nashville’ because I hail from the state of  Tennessee.’

  He unfolded a piece of paper from his pants pocket, and held it in his hands, although there were no words written upon it.

  ‘Vung Tau,’ said Nashville, ‘is an R&R centre for US troops and an R&C centre for the Australian Army. The difference between R&R and R&C is we’ve got dough and they ain’t. The Aussies are a menace to society, and their logistics base on Back Beach is home to the largest concentration of broke-ass, no-class booze-hounds in Indochina.’ Nashville shuddered at the policing challenge posed by the Australians.

  ‘But at least the Australians are friendly,’ said Nashville. ‘Our Korean allies, on the other hand, should be treated as hostile, as should any offer of raw local pussy.’

  The men laughed, because Nashville had said ‘pussy’.

  Nashville composed his face into a severe expression, which – although he couldn’t see it – reminded him of General MacArthur.

  ‘Fifty per cent of the broads in this town are whores,’ said Nashville, as if he disapproved of this fact, ‘and ninety per cent of the whores carry VD.’

  The men glanced involuntarily at their genitals.

  ‘If you have boom-boom with a bar girl and do not use protection, you will contract VD,’ said Nashville. ‘Although syphilis is rare in South Vietnam, pubic lice, genital warts and gonorrhoea’ – Nashville rolled his r’s with relish – ‘are common. There have also been cases of chancroid’ – he enjoyed that word, too – ‘granuloma inguinale and, most magnificent of all, lymphogranuloma venereum.’

  Nashville swallowed, to allow the men time to do the same. He wished he had slides to illustrate this part of the talk.

  ‘Here in Vung Tau, we’re at the front line of the war against venereal disease,’ said Nashville, ‘but what might be called the “back line” of the war against Communism. We’re closer to Cambodia and Thailand than we are to North Vietnam.’

  Nashville knew not a single new guy would have any idea where – or even what – Thailand or Cambodia might be.

  ‘In town, you may see a Viet Cong at the markets, buying rice,’ said Nashville. ‘Charlie – and they’re all called “Charlie” – pays for his chow with our own Military Payment Certificates, and you’ll wonder how he got them, since it’s illegal for zipperheads to own MPCs or for grunts to trade them. Then you’ll remember an evening with a dame called Truc in a bar named after your home state, when she told you she loved you and left you with the crabs. She wouldn’t accept Vietnamese piastres, so you paid in MPCs.’

  Nashville patted his pocket. ‘Part of your dough went to the owner of the bar, or mama-san,’ said Nashville, ‘and the other part to the owner of the pussy, or Truc. She sent half her share back to her village, where her brother fights for the VC. He drove his cart into town to trade your pussy vouchers for rice from local farmers, and black-market weapons from his cousin in the South Vietnamese army.’

  Nashville adopted a stern, saddened and God-fearing face. ‘And so it is,’ he said, ‘that we lie down with their sisters, and their sisters give our money to their brothers, to get guns from our allies, to shoot off our balls.

  ‘Yes,’ he boomed, ‘every foul commercial transaction which results in unnatural and loveless intercourse leads us one step closer to our own doom.’

  He shook his head. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘at least we get to fuck their sisters.’

  The men shuffled, disquieted. Nashville smiled.

  ‘Now to Communism,’ said Nashville. ‘When Ho Chi Minh declared North Vietnam’s independence in 1945 he said, “All the peoples on the Earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and to be free.” At this point, the British stepped in and proclaimed martial law in Saigon. What kind of man makes a revolution against the British for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?’

  Nashville paused. ‘A Communist,’ he said.

  There was muttering among the six men, but Nashville spoke over them. ‘Communism,’ he said, ‘like VD, passes from person to person as a whisper in the night. The only condom that can protect against Communism is democracy. Without democracy, the South Vietnamese will catch Communism. But not here in Vung Tau.’

  Nashville beamed. This was his favourite thing about the whole war.

  ‘In 1954, at the end of the French war, Vietnam was divided into two halves,’ he said. ‘To make things easier to remember, they called the bad guys “the North” and the good guys “the South”, just like in our Civil War.

  ‘About nine hundred thousand refugees, most of them Catholics, fled from bad North to good South, and many of them made their home in the coastal city furthest from the border: that is, Vung Tau.’

  Nashville opened his arms to welcome the migrants. ‘Catholics are the only true anti-Communists in Vietnam,’ he said. ‘The rest of them are in it for the dough. The Catholics have turned Vung Tau into a place where Americans make love, not war. We’re an island of capitalism in a sea of socialism. The most dangerous thing that happens here is R&R.’

  Nashville had enjoyed the attention of the troops, but saw their concentration was melting in the morning sun, and realised it was time to wrap things up.

  ‘Does any man have any questions?’ he asked.

  The soldiers were silent.

  ‘By happy chance,’ said Nashville, ‘today we begin joint patrols with the Australian Army. What we hope to achieve, I couldn’t tell you. I only know that the Aussies have done a tremendous job of pacifying Phuoc Tuy province, which was one of the most peaceful in Vietnam before they got here and doesn’t seem to have got any worse since they arrived, which is a fucking outstanding success for any military program.’

  Nashville raised his voice for his final address. ‘As you go about your duties,’ he said, ‘remember this: you are in the best unit in the best army in the best city in the best war the world has ever known. It is almost unheard of for a soldier to be killed in Vung Tau, and military police here have sustained no casualties whatever.

  ‘This is
your war, men; a gift from the gods. Enjoy it, because one day it’ll be over.

  ‘But not,’ he added, ‘any time soon.’

  Hauser was still at the guard post when Nashville nudged the boom gate with the fender of his jeep. Nashville leaned out of the jeep and asked him how Caution had seemed on the night he disappeared.

  ‘Just as usual,’ said Hauser. ‘Ornery. Drunk.’

  Nashville slept two thin walls apart from Caution, in the same hut. Night after night he heard Caution fall through the door, piss on the floor and leave it for the hoochmaid to mop.

  ‘Why’d you think he went to Le Boudin?’ asked Nashville.

  The guard looked down at his gun. ‘Pussy,’ he replied, as if it were the name of the rifle.

  ‘Sounds like he was too pissy to poke it,’ said Nashville.

  ‘He was,’ said Hauser.

  The guard passed Nashville a piece of paper. ‘This was in his rack the morning after,’ he said. ‘You might want to find it, or you might want to lose it.’ Nashville accepted the ambiguous gift with suspicion. It did not sound like the kind of thing that might make his life any easier.

  Waiting on the other side of the boom gate was Nashville’s new Australian partner. Through the funhouse mirror of the morning heat haze, Nashville had trouble focusing on the awkward man who clambered into the jeep, with hair like buttered corn and milky, cratered skin.

  Christ, thought Nashville, he must be at least six-five.

  ‘Shorty,’ said the man, holding out his hand.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Nashville.

  ‘No, it’s my name,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville shook his big hand and tried to figure if Shorty’s trip-switch nose had been pressed by a punch.