At The Edge OF The War (Part One)

by Randy Chandler

"Don't start laughing," Sparks said with mock solemnity. The ocean breeze tousled his blond hair, and a smirk teased the corners of his mouth. "Cuz you'll get me started and we won't be able to stop."

Trench grinned and took another hit from a fat joint cocooned in yellow paper. Sparks watched him closely, blue eyes sparkling in afternoon sunlight. Trench exhaled and the wind whipped away the smoke. He passed the reefer back and suppressed another fit of coughing.

"The gooks paint this shit in opium." Sparks held the smoke in his lungs as he spoke; he sounded like a terminal emphysema patient. "Really kicks your ass."

The waves lashed the beach with liquid diamonds and Trench knew he was stoned. Trench the FNG (Fucking New Guy). Twenty-years-old and smoking dope for the first time in his life at the edge of the South China Sea with an amiable young man from Minnesota who looked so much like a surfer dude he could've been a Hollywood extra in one of those Beach Blanket Bozo movies. Moon Doggie Sparks. Sparks had been in-country nine months and, having achieved the coveted short-timer's status, liked to play the I'm So Short game. "I'm so short" the player would say, and finish the sentence with something witty like "that I have to walk on tiptoes to keep my balls from dragging on the ground." Trench, on the other hand (and with well over three hundred days left of his tour of duty in Vietnam), was so not short he had to use field glasses to lace up his jungle boots. So went the game.

"Check out Papa-san," said Sparks, pointing down the beach at an old Vietnamese man in a conical straw hat who had dropped his pants and was squatting to take a crap. "That's what we're fighting for, right? So Papa-san can to take a dump on the beach for democracy."

Trench lost it and broke the don't-laugh rule. Sparks cracked up, too, and they laughed all the way back to the compound of the 66th Military Police Company to which they--along with 160 other American soldiers--were assigned.

The beach was only a hundred yards from the front gate of the company area, but they were moving in slow motion and it seemed to take a long time to cross the blacktop road and finally arrive at the guard shack. Sparks was wearing cut-off fatigue pants, a sun-bleached-to-pink red T-shirt, and VC thongs with tire-tread soles, but Trench was still in full jungle-fatigue uniform with a regulation olive-drab ball cap covering his buzz-cut. The Minnesota surfer dude and the green soldier, stoned out of their minds and trying to hide it, snickering and glassy-eyed.

PFC Dudley manned the guard shack and gave them the fish eye.

"'Sup, Dud?" said Sparks, cool and casual.

"Sergeant Blank was looking for you," said Dudley, standing behind a waist-high stack of sandbags.

"Shit," said Sparks with a dung-eating grin. "Wonder whose ass he's gonna ride when I'm back in the World."

"Probably his, if he keeps hanging with you," said Dudley.

It took Trench longer than it should have to realize Dud was pointing a finger at him. He resisted the impulse to rip the shack rat's MP brassarde off his shoulder and wrap it around his Dudley Do-Right chin. They were all MOS-95B-military policemen by training, which meant they weren't cowed by the armband on a man's shoulder or the "MP" on his helmet; if the man wearing them deserved respect, they gave it to him. Dudley wasn't earning much respect by being a smart-ass, but Trench was the effing-gee here, so he had to show proper deference by not feeding him his brassarde. He hoped Dud was smart enough to appreciate it.

Sparks headed for the enlisted men's clubhouse to drink some 3.2 beer, but Trench had to take a leak, so he stopped off at the piss-tubes. Having grown up in a small town in Georgia, next to a patch of woods, pissing outdoors was not new to him, but sending a stream of urine down the throat of an iron pipe stuck in the ground wasn't like pissing on a tree. Hosing down a tree was liberating, something outdoorsmen naturally did, but whenever Trench stood amid rows of piss-tubes that resembled mortar launchers, he couldn't shake the feeling those tubes were going to shoot back.

The piss-tubes were corralled by a low-slung privacy fence of rusted tin, so instead of staring into the iron pipe, he watched a Vietnamese civilian worker drag cut-down metal drums out from under the nearby four-seater outhouse, souse them with fuel oil, and toss matches to set the shit afire. It was an effective way of getting rid of human waste, but Trench didn't understand why they had to burn it so close to the mess hall. More often than not, the stinking black smoke went right through the mess hall windows.

He shifted his idle gaze to the Vietnamese kids playing in front of their tin-roofed shanties on the other side of the strung-out coils of concertina wire that separated the compound from the blond sand of the civilians' yards. They were pretty much like the kids he'd seen back home, the children of low-income families who lived in shotgun houses with raked dirt for front lawns. Children of poverty, running and playing, naked or in diapers or dirty shorts. One little boy of about three was staring at him. Trench flashed him a smile. The kid picked up a stick and aimed it like a gun. Trench made a goofy face and the kid dropped the stick, turned, and ran for cover. Mama-san swatted his bottom and pretended not to see the crazy GI at the piss-tube.

Three F-4 Phantom Jet fighter-bombers crossed the sky as Trench sauntered toward the clubhouse. They had been bombing a ragged range of mountains north of Qui Nhon, off and on, all afternoon. The distant explosions and towers of white smoke comforted him. The war was close, he thought, but U.S. airpower was holding it back. For now.

He stepped from bright sunlight into the shadowy interior of the clubhouse. Sparks was at the bar, talking to Sam. Sam was the Vietnamese bartender, a kid of eighteen with a thick sweep of black hair that kept falling over his dark eyes.

"I no VC," Sam was saying. "You VC."

Sparks sucked on a Winston, struggling to keep a serious _expression. "I think you VC. You wan' kill boo-coo GI."

"Shee-it," said Sam. "You dinky dau, Sparks."

"No, I'm not crazy. You wan' kill GI with this Tiger Piss beer."

They both laughed, Sam affectionately touching Sparks' forearm. Trench sat next to Sparks and said, "Give me a bottle of Tiger Piss, Sam."

Sam popped the cap off the brown bottle of 333 and set the Vietnamese beer on the bar at Trench's elbow. Sometimes it tasted a little better than a "green beer" Bud or Blue Ribbon.

"Fuckin' gooks same-same VC," said Sp/4 Rooker, the company armorer, as he staggered toward the door. "Can't trust any of 'em."

When Rooker was gone, Sam cut his eyes at the empty doorway and said: "Fuckin' gook."

Sparks and Trench broke into raucous laughter. Sam joined in, but his laughter was hollow. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels started the jukebox thumping with Devil With The Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly. Trench and the jukebox had arrived the same week; Sparks said this was a good omen for the new guy, pointing out that before the arrival of the jukebox, the club had to depend on Armed Forces Radio for tunes--a less than happy state of affairs for music lovers of any stripe.

It was too early for the club to be crowded. Four men played cards at a corner table, and one of the off-duty cooks shot the shit with a guy from the transportation company next door. Ceiling fans moved the cigarette smoke around.

"Rooker thinks he's Sergeant-fucking-Rock," said Sparks. "He wouldn't last a day in
the boonies. Only reason they made the dumb-ass an MP is 'cause he's too big to hump a ruck in the jungle. Fucker'd stand out like a water buffalo. Can you see him sneaking up on Charlie?"

"Man, I'm really..." Trench's voice trailed off as he lost himself down the neck of his beer bottle.

"Stoned," said Sparks. "Popped your cherry. Now you're a head fer sure."

"Ahead of what?"

"A head. A pot head," Sparks explained. "And I don't mean the steel pot that goes on your noggin."

"Oh, right, yeah." Trench chuckled. He dug in his breast pocket for his pack of smokes. He still had a hard time believing the PX sold name brand smokes for five cents a pack. At those prices, a man couldn't afford not to smoke.

"You getting the munchies yet? Smoke up and the next thing you know, you're so hungry you'd eat the ass out of Papa-san's water buff."

"Are all short-timers as crazy as you?" Trench asked with a straight face.

"Gotta cope with the dope, troop. It'll get you through."

Sergeant Blank darkened the club's doorway and bellowed: "Sparks! What's that shit you got hanging on your locker?"

Sparks snickered into his fist as he turned on the barstool to face his platoon sergeant. "What shit, Sarge?"

"You know what shit." Blank removed his cap and wiped sweat off his balding head. "That fuck-ing peace sign hippie shit made out of razor wire."

"Oh. That. Just a little interior decoration, Sarge. GI art."

"Art, fart," said Blank. "You will take it down and shit-can it most ricky-tick. Now, Sparks. Move your bony ass."

"Right, Sarge. I'm moving." Sparks grinned at Trench, muttered, "Art, fart," under his breath, and then slid off the stool and headed back to Bravo Company's barracks.

"A word to the wise, Private Trench," Blank said with his hands on his wide hips. "You lie down with dogs, you're gonna get fleas. You get me?"

Trench scratched his armpit and said, "Yes, Sergeant."

With a precise flick of his wrist, Blank snapped his cap over his tanned and gleaming dome and marched off.

Trench looked at Sam and shrugged. Sam nodded in the direction of the departing sergeant, smiled, and said, "Fuckin' gook."

The jukebox went silent. Trench took a cool drag from his Salem and listened to the fast-movers' payloads pounding the distant mountains. What kind of war was this? How was it he could be sitting at a bar, drinking beer and listening to good ol' rock 'n 'roll, while slant-eyed guys in black pajamas and funny hats were getting their shit blown away just a few miles from here? It sure as hell wasn't like the movies. Nothing was predictable in this war of twisted logic.

The bombs rumbled like distant thunder. Trench shuddered in the muggy heat. He could feel the war coming closer. It was looking for him, and when it found him, it would try to kill him.

* * *

PFC Prospero was hunched over the card table, scribbling wildly in his sketchbook. The floppy brim of his bush hat hid his eyes. His OD T-shirt was faded to pastel green. Every once in a while he would take a sip from his can of Hamm's beer and scan the club as if looking for Viet Cong assassins.

Trench had heard that Prospero was a talented artist who was sure to be a great cartoonist someday. A compulsive comic-book collector himself, he figured this was a good time to get a peek at Prospero's work. He walked over to the young man's table.

"Mind if I see what you're working on?" Trench asked.

Prospero looked up. He seemed momentarily disoriented, as if he were coming out of a deep trance. "You're the new supply dude," he said with a Brooklyn accent.

"Yeah. I'm supposed to be an MP, but when they found out I could type, they made me supply clerk. Guess they were hard up."

"Who ain't?" He turned his sketchbook around so Trench could see the full-page ink drawing.

"Wow." Trench stared, mesmerized, at the monstrous figure on the page. "That's really good. Boo-coo creepy."

"Razor Face Charlie, the phantom sapper," Prospero explained. "He slips through the wire like a ghost, plants his charges and slips out, then--BOOM--you're dead and he's back in the jungle, eating lizards and vines and plotting his next hit. Those scars on his face are from razor wire. Nothing can keep him out."

"He looks so fucking real. For a cartoon, I mean."

Private Prospero smiled. "He is real. He's out there. He could be watching us right now, deciding if we're worth his time."

Trench tried to laugh. He coughed instead. He couldn't take his eyes off the cartoon super villain. Razor Face Charlie. Every soldier's nightmare. A phantom that comes in the night to blow you apart while you're sleeping. Prospero had drawn him with such exaggerated detail that the evil figure was larger than life, ready to leap off the page, overpower you with his dark, ropy muscles and strangle you with his twisty-vine fingers.

Cold claws crept up Trench's spine and scratched at the back of his skull.

Now the war had a face.

* * *

His first month passed like a kidney stone--painfully slow, but with no real danger to his physical health. His mental health was a different story. He fell asleep every night wondering if Razor Face Charlie was crawling in his direction, carrying a satchel full of explosives. Charlie invaded his dreams with complete disregard for the buxom round-eyed babes who came like succubae in response to Trench's nocturnal arousals. The phantom sapper was the stinking stuff his dreams were made of; dreams so real that when they scared him awake he could still smell the lizard meat on Charlie's breath. Trench began to worry he was losing his mind. He thought it might help if he could talk to someone about it, but fear of ridicule kept his lips zipped, and his budding paranoia remained his secret. He slept poorly. He went zombie-like through his daily routines. He lost weight. Purple circles bloomed beneath his eyes. He smoked a lot of weed and drank a lot of beer when he was off duty. When he was stoned, Razor Face didn't scare him so much. It didn't occur to him until later his marijuana intake might be contributing to his paranoia and to his general feeling that the war was closing in on him.

Logic told him his chances of getting killed were slim. After all, he had a desk job in a company of MPs whose primary responsibility was security. The 66th was a guard company. They provided security for docks, depots and other military sites in and around the Qui Nhon area. And Qui Nhon was not where the action was. It was said to be an R&R center for the enemy; NVA regulars and the Viet Cong wanted to keep their vacation spot quiet and peaceful--so the story went. Trench was a certified REMF (Rear Echelon Mother Fucker) in a quiet area, so why should he be so afraid? He didn't know and his fear shamed him. Grunts out in the bush were getting shot at and killed or maimed every day, so what right did Trench have to feel this intense fear? His answer was always the same: None whatsoever.

But Razor Face Charlie was no respecter of logic. The phantom sapper continued to haunt Trench's nights, leering at him with that hideously scarred face.

Then, midway through his second month in-country, Trench (with brand-new PFC stripes on his arms) got his first taste of action. It didn't amount to much in the overall scheme of war, but the fact that somebody was really and truly trying to end his life delighted him. You're not paranoid if they're really trying to kill you, he told himself.

He was tooling down the highway in a Jeep, carrying a trailer full of the men's dirty uniforms to the Korean laundry, when a sniper took a shot at him. The round snapped past his ear, so he knew his head had been the target. He hunched his shoulders, floored the accelerator and boogied on down the highway. He hooted. He laughed. He pounded the steering wheel in celebration. Victor Charlie had sent a bullet his way and missed. Death had passed him by.

But on the drive back to the compound, it occurred to him the sniper had missed because there was no bullet with his name on it. His name was on a satchel charge in the possession of Razor Face Charlie. His survivor's elation bled out, leaving him deflated and more terrified than ever. Now the war knew where he was. It had dog-eared him for later.

That night in Headquarters Platoon's hootch, "Little Joe" Renfroe stood on his footlocker at the foot of his bunk and preached The Gospel According To Little Joe. The diminutive personnel clerk said God came in the night and spoke to him: "He stood right here on my footlocker and talked to me," Little Joe declared. The other guys had a good laugh at this when they saw that Little Joe was serious. Of course, they told him he was crazy and advised him to keep the footlocker visitation to himself unless he wanted a Section-8 discharge for being mentally unfit for duty. Little Joe sulked a while, then retreated to the shithouse for some serious meditation.

Trench had laughed along with his bunkmates at the little guy, but in his heart he knew he was probably as delusional as Little Joe. In fact, he envied Joe. A night visit from God had to be better than a visit from Razor Face Charlie--even if God was pissed off and looking to kick some sinner ass. From Charlie there would be no forgiveness.

Later that night Spooky came, and Trench went outside to watch the fireworks. Also known as Puff the Magic Dragon, Spooky was a C-47 cargo plane refitted with mini-guns capable of firing 6,000 rounds per minute. Every fifth round was a red tracer, so when those mini-guns cut loose at night, a steady stream of red rained down on the target area. Spooky was also equipped with a foghorn, and when you heard it, you knew why they called it the Magic Dragon. It was supposed to spook the Cong. It spooked Trench well enough, but he'd always loved fireworks and couldn't resist seeing Spooky in action. He didn't need to be stoned to appreciate this light-show display of really awesome firepower. Maybe they'll get lucky and take out old Razor Face, he thought. But he knew better. The phantom sapper was too sharp to get himself zapped by the Magic Dragon; his own dark magic would keep him alive and deadly.

After the gunship moved off into the night sky, Trench's mood turned morose. He leaned against the sandbag wall and lit a smoke. The only other person he could see was the sentry manning the nearest guard tower. Everyone not on duty was supposed to be bedded down for the night. Since he couldn't talk to anyone else about his phantom-sapper fantasy, he decided to talk to himself. He spoke sotto voce, laying out his irrational fear that a comic-book character was coming to kill him. Then he responded to himself in the voice of a hard-ass Drill Sergeant he'd grudgingly admired during basic training at Ft. Benning: "You know why you have such a shitty outlook on life, Private Trench? I'll tell you why, shit-fer-brains. Because you got your head so far up your ass you're choking on your own feces, that's why, Private Trench. Wake up and smell the bullshit, troop. A cartoon cannot kill you."

"I know that," Trench replied to his pseudo-shrink and devil's advocate. "It's a whatchamacallit, a symbol…like…ah shit, this is stupid. I can't talk to you." He field-stripped his cigarette butt, crept back to his hootch and sacked out for the night. Razor Face Charlie was waiting for him in dreamland, crawling through mud and wire, inching inevitably forward.

* * *

After a monotonous day of typing reports and inventorying supplies, Trench went with Sparks to Soul City--the cooks' little hootch next to the mess hall--to smoke dope with a couple of soul brothers of the culinary arts. As they were toking up, Corporal Des Hotel, who knew how to whip up the best shit-on-a-shingle in this man's army, said, "Don't seem right, doing maryjane wid pigs."

"Hey," said Sparks. "We ain't pigs. We're combat security guards. And my man Trench here is a supply clerk."

"I'm still an MP, though," Trench defended his ego.

"Pigs is pigs," said Des Hotel, shaking his head. A Temptations tape played on an Akai recorder. A string of Christmas lights around the door gave the little room a festive ambiance.

Soul Train Jackson passed the joint to Sparks and said, "They okay, man. Leave 'em alone. Lots of MPs blow weed."

"Ain't no big thing," said Sparks, "as long as we don't get high on duty."

Leaning back in a beach chair purchased in the PX, Trench tried to relax and enjoy the music, but he noticed Des Hotel kept eyeing him. Finally, Trench said, "I got shit on my face or something? Why do you keep staring at me?"

Des Hotel flashed a cold smile and said, "You been hoodooed, man. I know. I seen it before."

"What're you talking about?"

"My moms was into that hoodoo stuff. Folks used to come to her to take spells off. Somebody'd put a root on 'em or something, and they'd be all like, 'You gots to help me, Livia, I cain't go on like dis.'" He said this last part in comical falsetto.

"I don't get it," said Trench, though he did. Somehow Des Hotel knew that he was cursed with obsessive fear.

"You know what I'm talking 'bout. I can see it eatin' at ya. You need to find somebody to take the spell off. You don't, you fucked."

Sparks studied Trench's face, then said, "You have been sort of squirrelly lately."

Trench said, "Aw, fuck it, man. It ain't nothing."

"Ah-riight," said Des Hotel, handing him the reefer. "You da man."

"Fucking-A," said Trench, "I'm da man."

Da man didn't sleep much that night. It wasn't the sand blowing in through the windows or the snores of his hootch-mates that kept him awake; it was Des Hotel's assertion that Trench had been hoodooed. It made sense in an off-kilter way. A wartime voodoo was at work here. He'd looked at Prospero's drawing of Razor Face Charlie while under the influence of mind-altering drugs. The grotesque visual image had slipped past his normal psychic defenses, and Charlie's ugly mug lodged in his mind like a piece of meat stuck in his teeth, triggering a primal fear of death and dismemberment. In effect, Trench had hoodooed himself. But voodoo curses only worked if you believed in them (he'd learned this from countless horror movies back in the World and accepted it as truth), so all he had to do was stop believing the phantom sapper was coming to blow him up. But it wasn't that easy, he learned after a restless hour of whispering: "I don't believe it." By sunup he had a plan for removing the inadvertent curse. A drawing had triggered the curse, so he needed another drawing to take it off. It was so simple it had to work.

He hummed as he shaved that morning. He winked at himself in his little mirror as he dipped his razor in his upside-down helmet of clean water. He was confident Razor Face Charlie would soon be banished to the Boogey Man graveyard.

The day went by quickly. Lieutenant Caputo needed a driver, so he pulled Trench out of the supply room and told him they had to go downtown to pick up a drunk and disorderly GI who was in a Vietnamese jail and deliver him to his CO. Caputo's arm was in a sling as a result of a recent altercation with First Sergeant O'Hara, a juicer and brawler who had no respect for cherry lieutenants. Caputo was an FNG and a brand-new second looey, so he'd wisely chosen not to press assault charges against Top.

Randy Chandler served with the 66th Military Police Company in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, 1967-1968. His novel Duet For The Devil (co-authored by t. Winter-Damon) was nominated for the 2000 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. His short stories have appeared in numerous small-press publications and more recently in on-line magazines such as EOTU and Horrorfind. In the Eighties and early Nineties he reviewed books for The Atlanta Journal-Constituion, and interviewed author Robert Stone for The Atlanta Journal. Chandler is marketing his first solo novel, Bad Juju, and is currently working on his next novel. He and his wife of twenty-four years live in Mableton, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. "At The Edge of the War" is his first Vietnam story. "Until recently," Chandler explains, "I'd always thought that the literature of the Vietnam war should be written by combat soldiers, but because most Americans who served there did so to support the warriors, it occurred to me the edge-of-the-war experience might spawn an interesting story or two. The literary canon of the Vietnam war is still growing."