Savage Garden
by Robert Philbin
[ fiction - june 08 ]
"Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end to all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth."
- Genesis 6:11
The war was everywhere but not here in these rice paddies, at least not today, Phillips thought, it's too hot for combat and every soldier knows that death is most embarrassingly inconvenient on a hot day. One never knows anything with certainty any more, Phillips thought, but it's just too fucking hot to die. Nothing happens, then suddenly something happens and then horror arrives and with it comes that rush of excitement when you step up and confront chaos head on, the thrill of managing it, shaping it into something reasonable, something usable, acceptable, a rationalization, maybe even a lie, Phillips thought. But veracity didn't carry much weight in the end, because what mattered in the end, was that everyone around you was alive, when the chaos calmed, and horror's unholy visitation drifted away.
Phillips absorbed the hundred-degree heat on the back of his neck. He was moving with the troops along a narrow red dirt road at the base of the mountain they had just come down. He poured water from his canteen over his head and let it stream down his chest and back as he studied how the road bent like an elbow between two low rice paddies and then opened onto an overgrown flat field, bordered by a tangle of ancient thick Banyan trees. He focused on the trees. They were wild now, untended to, but they must have been planted at the edge of the field by a foreigner, Phillips thought. A spice trader from India maybe, a Chinese silk merchant or monk, maybe, who planted the Banyan there long before Phillips was born, then skilfully pruned them and propped up the heavy sagging branches, meticulously shaping the ever-spreading foliage over time into a landscape, a cultivated place of shade and rest from the sun, a place for deeper human connections, for each other and the earth.
And then later, who could know for what reason, the landscape makers abandoned this place, giving it up in the midst of one war, only that it might become, a lifetime later, a shaded place in yet another war, a respite and rallying point where Phillips' platoon was now to hook up with the second platoon and await the arrival of the evacuating choppers which would carry them back to their war. The Banyan tree, like me, is not native to this land, he thought. A perfect place to rest out of the heat, he thought, as Phillips forced his mind's endless train of streaming thought back into the war.
Phillips knew that further south, near Ben Cat or Son My, the VC would readily dig spider-holes anywhere along this dirt road, or at the edges of a rice paddy, or near the reach of Banyan trees, where they'd jump up from with a fast burst of AK fire, or a grenade or booby trap wire, and bring the war back to you with certain instant fury, before disappearing back into their holes. But Phillips also guessed the NVA wouldn't have the time for that kind of war these days; not with the arc flights lighting up their nights, reminding them again and again that air superiority is what drives or drops a modern army. Phillips guessed the NVA was on the defensive now. Trying to hold out now, kill time, without taking more casualties; fighting the smaller war of mortars and harassment, shoring up their defensive positions until the Monsoons and the seasonal resupply of fresh troops and equipment moved down from the north.
Phillips thought there was something about this place of the banyan tree that carried an aura of tranquility, a sense of human prescience over time and nature, a different kind of history, silently felt and read in the remnants and markings of past human habitations, the way a crumbling barn in the middle of Indiana, or a blown out temple in Svay Rieng, Cambodia, carry secrets learned in what remains of human labor, and existence. The foxholes and trenches and Yard graveyards they had come upon throughout the high lands were years, even decades old. Time and patience favored the enemy now, Phillips thought, and that thought made him anxious to find and engage the little people while his troops were strong and ready to carry the fight.
Had the little people launched attacks from these mountains against the Japanese in another generation? Against the French colonial paratroopers at Kon Tum, following General Giap, the history teacher turned revolutionary soldier, a decade later? What were the Americans doing here now? Phillips raised these questions only rarely and even then quickly put them aside. It was a trick he had taught himself early on, the combat soldier's survive tactic of separating his mind and emotions into manageable compartments. You can only think so much, you can only feel so much, and then overload and confusion arrives. The system shuts down and chaos overwhelms everything. The trick was never to confuse the separate compartments. Never to shut down the wrong compartment at the wrong time. Life meant discovering things worth thinking about, Phillips felt, things worth remembering; but war meant something else, something to be studied and mastered, distant from the normal life of the normal human being, and, most important of all Phillips knew, war, even in the human mind, was a living thing to be survived.
Maybe it was the old man with a long bamboo herding stick standing on the side of the red dirt road this morning that took Phillips out of his war mind and into this observing pensive state. He had grown increasingly uncomfortable in any loose mental state, and he tried now not to think about politics or history, or rational discourses. The past didn't matter now, he warned himself, what mattered now was focus in the moment, and the present moment was always war, even if you could not find war when you looked for it. It was there, waiting for you. So now Phillips watched the old man and behind him, knee-deep in the muddy rice paddy, the old man's big old water buffalo. Phillips watched as the buffalo wrenched a twisted horn up with a sudden jolt toward the heat-shimmering sky, startling the tiny bird perched on the bull's withered, shit-splattered haunches, off into awkward flight.
Two troops carried Blake's body, the dead trooper, wrapped in a slick green poncho and laced to thick bamboo poles that bent and bounced in perfect rhythm with their steady stride along the road. A third trooper carried the dead man's weapon and gear. Phillips walked behind Y-Ngo now thinking about how Alpha Company had gotten caught moving like that from one ridge line to another, a company caught in an ambush on the move, that was no easy trick. He tried to calculate the size of the unit he'd likely hit on that ridge line later today. Several NVA companies at least, he concluded. He wondered if the NVA would breakdown a battalion, or commit additional companies later? Then Phillips studied the old man leaning on his herding stick, dressed in dark brown and red rags, an old sweat-stained straw coolie hat to keep him from the sun. The straw hat was polished with years of perspiration, worn into a hard dark mahogany, a permanent fixture shaped by the old man's skull.
This is where the war lives now, Phillips thought. In the ancient red-streaked eyes of this old rice peasant on the side of the road in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. A man who bows now, formally, repeatedly, a gesture presuming mutual respect, as the line of American paratroopers pass by, one by one, each troop receiving the bow as a courtesy, an extension, a reminder that we are all connected somehow. A certain plea in the dark fire of the old man's eyes seemed to say, please don't injure the old water buffalo you see before you, knee deep in the paddy water and mud. He is my water buffalo, so I ask each of you, with respect, one man to another man, please don't shoot my water buffalo out of boredom or amusement, or hatred or anger, or whatever motivates savages like you to come this ancient place with your filthy war and shoot an old man's water buffalo for no good reason. The old man's eyes persisted bravely as each soldier passed him. This old bull is all I have to my name, his eyes said, the old bull is my engine, my friend, my waterwheel, my estate, my legacy.
Phillips nodded a polite bow to the old man as he passed him and glanced off toward the line of wild ragged Banyan trees, looking for a good shaded rallying point to spread out and rest and wait for second platoon and the choppers to come in. Phillips slipped two cans of C-ration scrambled eggs and a pack of C-rat Marlboro cigarettes from his pockets and dropped them at the old man's feet with a easy nod. The old peasant stared straight at him, straight through him, and Phillips felt the years of war and what war can do to a life in his steady gaze. "Nobody fucks with the old man. Or the water buffalo." Phillips said to Dunman as he passed and the old man nodded his head to the next soldier in line. Dunman, dropped some c-rats on the ground and echoed Phillips' order and it moved like a mumbled rumor up and down the line of paratroopers. ‘Don't do the old gook, or the fucked-up cow.' Phillips heard someone say back down the line.
They had made good time coming off the mountain and were an hour early for the rendezvous. So there was time to study the map and think through what might happen when they hit the ground on the ridge line above Alpha Company. Phillips would form a parameter first after assaulting out of the choppers, he thought, and when they were secure, he'd drop three patrols down the mountain slope and back to the parameter in circles to probe the terrain and see what kind of force they faced. They would probably be ordered to blast their way into contact with Alpha Company, although Dunman had lost radio contact with Battalion headquarters as soon as they hit the low ground, so Phillips had no status reports about the current situation.
Phillips found a good place with plenty of shade in the cluster of banyan trees, dropped his rucksack and sat down on his helmet. The troops carrying Blake's poncho wrapped body settled down not far from him and Y-Ngo and the point team came in, dropped their packs, and sat down in the shade around Phillips. Dunman was eating a can of peaches with a white plastic spoon and he dropped his gear and started to screw a extended antenna into the radio. Phillips lit up a cigarette and spread out his map wrapped in clear plastic on the ground between his boots in front of him.
Sergeant Riley spread the platoon out on half stand down. Every other man could relax, lay back, read a letter, pop a can of C-rats, light up; but every other troop faced the outer parameter in the prone firing position, armed and on alert. Then Riley came up to Phillips under the Banyan tree, slipped out of his rucksack and lit up one of the thin black rope Italian cigars his wife regularly sent him by the half case.
"What happened to Blake?" Phillips asked right away.
"Leaned on his weapon sir. Used it like a walking stick when the guys moved up to the ridge." Riley blew a steady smoke plume into the heavy air. “Leaned on it. Bang. Bought the farm. Just like that.
Phillips stared at him. “Shit Sergeant. This is not good.”
"Blew most of his face clean off." Riley narrowed his red shot eyes, and blew more smoke. “You get crazy, or lazy?” Riley added with a rasp. “And you likely get dead. Ain't that the truth, Dunman!"
“Sounds like truth to me, Sarge.” Dunman said reflexively. He had the radio up now and was in contact with the company radio operator again.
"Dumb shit." Phillips picked up a twig and snapped it in half. "OK, gather 'round here people."
Phillips pointed with the twig to a ridge line on the map that looked like a broken finger on a giant hand that reached out grasping all the jungle it could pull up from the earth. "We'll probably go in here," he said. "Think there's an LZ there. Then we hump up and down this ridge. See that. I want some patrols working down here and here, and here." His finger moved up and down the ridge line and into impossibly tight crevices on the map. The squad leaders took notes. "If we don't hit anything, then we'll barrel-ass right into this area here, and see if we can bust through to Alpha, which is right about here. Now Edwards you're on point going in, so you setup the CP here, then Washington your squad takes twelve o clock on the parameter, and Jones you got our back. I'm with Edwards on the first ship in. Sergeant Riley you're bringing in the rear squad, on the last chopper out."
Phillips went on and on and on with his briefing and the squad leaders had questions, what if this, what if that, which Phillips answered directly until he noticed Y-Ngo, the Yard scout, ignoring the platoon briefing. He was squatting down low on his haunches next to Blake and he slowly poked at Blake's corpse and boots with one of his thin bamboo arrows. The Yards were strange about death and dying, and Phillips glanced at him, and Y-Ngo instantly flashed his even row of bright black teeth in an innocent smile.
"Get the fuck away from Blake," Dunman said. "The fuck's the matter with you!" Then Dunman glanced up to the sky. "Weird fucker. Birds are in bound, sir." He said, pointing now at a string of choppers approaching in the distance.
"Fucker makes me nervous." Dunman said.
