War was crazy, but it possessed a craziness that could be understood. There were rules, and the rules were simple. Sometimes Gaines wondered if he didn’t want to go back there just for a rest.
And, often, Gaines believed it had been a privilege to be so utterly, indescribably afraid. If you stayed afraid, you might make it through. That fear kept you alert; it kept your head in the game, and thus—possibly—it would enable you to keep that same head on your shoulders.
There were others who became unafraid. There were guys who became so numb to everything, they stopped looking and they stopped caring. They would walk out into gunfire with the certainty that it was all a dream.
Gaines believed that Mike Webster might be one of these men, the ones who had lost all connection to reality, the ones who had experienced emotions so far beneath and beyond actuality that they now lived in a different universe.
Gaines looked at Mike Webster, and he could see so many other men, so many who did not come back. Perhaps they returned physically, but not mentally or spiritually. They were still in-country. Would always and forever be in-country. In-country was the same, whichever war you spoke of.
It took a while for Gaines’s eyes to become accustomed to the darkness within Webster’s room, but when they did—when he started to pick out individual items among the shadows—he knew that Webster had slipped whatever moorings might have tethered him, and now he was elsewhere.
“Some folks, the way they think, they forever seem to come at something backward. Can’t see a thing for what it is. Forever considering something ain’t what it appears to be . . .”
Webster’s words hung in the air for a moment, and then he laughed. He lowered himself into a deep armchair, and Gaines noticed how the stuffing protruded from holes in the arms and the headrest. It was almost identical to the chair in Judith Denton’s house.
Gaines took a seat facing him—a plain wooden chair that creaked as he sat down.
“S’pose that’s just the way some folks is wired, is all,” Webster went on. “Sometimes everybody’s looking just so damned hard, they head out and overlook the obvious, you know?”
Webster reached for a half-empty bottle of rye, uncorked it, drank from it. He wiped the lip, handed it to Gaines.
Gaines shook his head, looked down for a moment. Beneath his feet was a pale brown rug, across it a dark stain that could have been blood or mud or oil. To his right was a low table, on it a collection of books, the titles obscured but for one slim volume of poetry by Walt Whitman. Beside the books were items he recognized with vivid familiarity: army-issue knives, a compass, webbing, a single boot, two .45s, a box of shells, an empty bandolier, a water canteen.
Against the left-hand wall were stacked boxes of numerous sizes, the uppermost balanced precariously on those beneath. Draped over the corner of one was a flak jacket.
The single window had been covered with a doubled-up bedsheet, and through it the light was dim and indistinct.
The more Gaines looked, the more he saw things that he did not wish to see.
Webster was holed up in here, bedded down. He had turned a motel cabin into some kind of foxhole, and he was waiting out whatever firefight was still raging in his head.
And Gaines could smell the sweat, the fear, the paranoia, the tension. It was an all-too-familiar smell.
“Things happen, right?” Webster said.
Gaines nodded. “Right,” he said.
“More bad than good, most times.”
Gaines stayed silent. He figured silence was the most effective encouragement he could give for whatever Webster had to say.
It was eleven in the morning; it could have been midnight, three a.m., anytime at all, and they could have been anywhere. Felt like Whytesburg stopped at the door, almost as if it didn’t want to come in.
“I was in the war before this one,” Mike said. “Joined up in May of forty-two, just four days after my nineteenth birthday. Was there in Guadalcanal in November of the same year.” He took another swig from the bottle. “After we secured Henderson Field, we went in, the only army battalion alongside six other marine battalions. Vandergrift had the First Marine Division. They wanted offensive actions west of the Matanikau River. Edson ran the show, and he wanted us to capture Kokumbona. Japs had their Seventeenth Army just west of Point Cruz. They were falling apart. They had been there forever. Disease was rife, they were malnourished, battle-fatigued, and we had more than five or six thousand men coming on strong. But they were merciless bastards. Fanatical. They gave us everything they had. November third, I was in a foxhole with my section. Nine of us left, all hunkered down to weather it through, and they hit us direct. Eight dead, one living.” Webster smiled, almost nostalgically. “And here I am, Sheriff Gaines of Whytesburg. Knocked sideways and senseless I might be, but here I fucking am.” He laughed, but there was little—if any—humor in that sound. “I seen it all, man, seen all that shit and then some. I spent weeks on point or rear cover, or maybe walking ridgelines. Never in the middle. Always visible. You know, if there was someone who was gonna get it today, well, that someone would be you. Like I said, it changes your fucking viewpoint, man.”
Mike drank again. Once more he offered it to Gaines. Gaines declined.
“Sometimes you would come back from a search and destroy, and you would simply puke, and then you would cry, and then you would puke some more. You would feel neither better nor worse, just confused, cheated perhaps, like God was on no one’s side. He was just fucking with everyone, you know? I feel like I’ve been fucked by God. Someone said that to me one time . . .”
Another pause.
Gaines could not have described how he felt. Sweat was running from his hairline and down his brow. His scalp felt electrified, as if every hair on his head was standing at attention. He felt the same as he had back then. Webster’s words, his monologue, his memories . . . they brought it all back like it was yesterday.
“Most of the bad stuff happens at night,” Webster said.
Gaines shuddered. Did he mean now, or back then?
“At night, you know? When the journalists and correspondents couldn’t take pictures. Man, I’d see them boys come down from wherever after forty-eight hours’ break, a half-dozen cameras slung around their necks like Hawaiian garlands, and there was still that distant look in their sun-bleached eyes, the look that came from watching the worst that the world could deliver through a viewfinder.” Webster laughed. “Present and correct, but not present and definitely not correct. Involved, but as spectator, not a participant. Even when they managed to grab a few hours’ sleep in a temporary barrack somewhere, they didn’t shower or shave, because they believed that if they washed the stink off of their skin, they’d be washing away their shield. War stink is camouflage; it’s disguise and protection, as good as any GI flak jacket. Those boys mailed cans of film out of combat zones by the fucking bucket load, but the shots that told the truth never made the presses, right?”
Gaines nodded. He leaned back a little. The chair creaked.
Webster leaned further toward Gaines, as if trying to keep him within the circle. The smell around him was a rank blend of wet dog and whiskey.
“You ever have a friend out there, Sheriff? I mean, a real friend, someone who watched your back, someone who looked after you, someone who was always there when you were ready to blow your own brains out just to get away from the horror?”
“Yes,” Gaines said. “Yes, I did.”
Webster smiled. “I had a friend like that, too . . .”
Gaines could see the Highlands then, as if he had returned only yesterday. Mountainous peaks, valleys like ruptures in the earth, as if something from within, some terrible force, had split the world at its seams. The bleak expanses of open ground, ground without respite, without cover, the sudden ravines and gorges, the scattering of Montagnard villages where the War of Hearts and Minds was being fought to engage them as allies, not suffer them as enemies. Up there the days were so wildly hot, the nights so freakishly cold, that there was no way to acclimate. The Ia Drang battles of ’65, battles that were over long before Gaines ever arrived in-country, were still a subject that evaded discussion. The Highlands were a country of the past, and the present would never find it. The reported VC dead at Ð
