GLOSSARY

"Hey, how about this?"

Inside the Cloth World store, on the other side of the remnants table, Sandy has unwound a bolt of saffron cloth, draped it all across her front, and is posing coquettishly. Her companion turns around; the blue eyes gray over, and the voice comes from far, far away, labored, choked.

"No. Saffron is no good for me."

1985.

* * *

1971.

A team house in an ARVN compound. The camp generators are faintly audible, an indistinct background drone to everything in this place. Nearer to hand, from a corner somewhere, AFVN is on the radio: "White Rabbit", "Inagada-davida", "Whiter Shade of Pale" ....

The roll-up bamboo shades have been let down; the inside is draped in gray shadows, even in the mid-afternoon. And it's stifling. But the man inside is oblivious to it. He is lying down on a GI cot, mentally perched on the razor's edge of the magic Zone between sleep and wakefulness. When he's in the Zone, memories, ideas, desires turn to images and he can direct them wherever he wants, instead of having to follow them blindly as in dream-time. For the moment, he is indulging himself. But not for long.

"Hey Lt., wake up."

"What the fuck do you want?"

"Word's come in that there's a VC tax collector out by ________."

"Yeah right. All the VC out here are supposed to have self-destructed in Tet68, and the rest been picked off by Phuong Huang. This is NVA country. Anyway, so what?"

"The major wants you to take a couple of squads from Thanh's platoon and go get him."

"Fan-fucking-tastic."

"Yeah, and they'd really really like him alive."

"A fucking body snatch?!! What about his escort? They gonna just chieu hoi the moment I poke my fucking roundeye face out of the elephant grass?"

"Hey Lt., I'm just the messenger, ok?"

The Lt. swings into action: get briefed, plan use of available time, issue warning order, do map recon, etc etc etc. He's done it all before: IOBC, ranger school, germany. But this isn't a training exercise -- it's for real; people are intentionally supposed to get hurt. He's had a few of those already, but not enough. So he still does it by the book.

Movement to contact is uneventful -- a couple of deuce-and-a-half's, a couple of gun jeeps, a huey overhead for air cover. On a curve in a dirt road they unload, slip into the surrounding jungle .... and are gone. Hours and hours later they arrive at the ambush site and set up. The ambush site is a 50-meter wide pond and a trail junction, located where some rice paddies end and the jungle begins. One foot in each world.

Most ambushes do not come off. They turn out to be nothing more than hours and hours of sitting, lying, in vegetation, motionless, noiselessly. If you're lucky, the bugs don't torment you too badly. Ambushes are the most terminally boring (non)activity on the face of the planet. This one almost proves to be no exception to the rule. They have been ordered out for at least 36 hours, on site -- somebody must want this VC tax collector pretty badly.

But nobody can sit still for 36 hours. People have to piss, eat, shit, sleep. So the men have to be periodically rotated, one at a time out of the positions and back to the patrol base. The Lt. conducts every one of these reliefs himself, personally. It doesn't sound like much of anything, but it helps structure *his* time, plus he feels that if he does it, there's a lot less chance some snuffy will stumblebum around or get spooked and inadvertently compromise the ambush. The Lt. tries to leave absolutely nothing to chance, to leave no room for any kind of fuckup.

They set up shortly before dusk of day 1. Nothing happens during the night of day 1. Nobody and nothing comes or goes up or down the trail. Next day: same-same. Contact comes on the second night. Thick clouds roll in, obliterating the the full moon. An intense electrical storm ensues -- no rain, just a lot of lightning, the kind that turns the landscape as bright as day for a millisecond or two, and then just as precipitously pitches it back into total obscurity. It is during one of those microsecond flashes that the Lt. sees something on the far shore of the pond. Something totally incongruous, totally unexpected. He swings his gun barrel around to a point in the direction of the object. He doesn't have to wait for long. At the next lightning flash, it's still there. Without thinking, on pure reflex, he squeezes the trigger. Two other weapons open up as well. Before the firing is over, it's dark again and the object has disappeared.

After an ambush has been sprung, you don't stand around to celebrate your success. You check out the kill zone and then leave the area as expeditiously as possible.

"Jaeger, get on the radio and let's get the extraction going."

"Ok Lt., but we're gonna have problems. We ain't got much of a ceiling here."

"Tell 'em to send the pilots with the biggest balls and we'll talk 'em in."

"Ain't you gonna check and see what we bagged?"

"Jaeger, you saw it and you fired on it. Did that look like any kind of VC tax collector to you?"

"No, but ..."

"So what's the point? Let's get the fuck out of here. We been here long enough. There ain't no VC tax collector, and if there is, he sure as shit ain't gonna be coming down that trail now."

The Lt. proceeds to deploy the patrol to the PZ out in the rice paddies.

"Jaeger, how 'about a sitrep on those choppers."

"ETA about two-zero, three-zero mikes"

After they have settled in for the wait, and it's clear that the extraction will be considerably delayed, Jaeger begins anew.

"What do *you* think it was, Lt?"

"I as much as told you, Jaeger, I don't know."

"But ain't you curious? I mean, way out here, in the middle of nowhere."

"It ain't 'way out here'; there's a ville, 2, 3 clicks from here."

"Yeah, but still ... man, it's too weird."

The Lt. was a person who saw himself, and who presented himself to the outside world, as a man whose shit was very, very tightly wrapped: focused, intense, thorough, methodical, rational, and, in the current context, a studious avoider of all unnecessary risks. But buried deep inside were many other traits of a contrary nature. One of them surfaced at that moment, and he acted on it. That was something he would soon come to regret, for indeed some sleeping dogs truly should be allowed to lie undisturbed.

"You really want to find out what it was, Jaeger?"

Silence.

"Come on then -- let's go."

They didn't have far to go to get back to the pond. With red-lensed flashlights they soon found a pair of legs projecting out from under some vegetation. The feet were bare but the rest of the legs, to where they disappeared into the vegetation, were swathed in large folds of red-orange cloth.

"Christ, look at all the fucking blood."

All of a sudden, "awareness" dawned on the Lt.

"It's a monk. A buddhist monk. They go around wrapped up in these huge orange, saffron-colored pieces of cloth. We shot us a monk, Jaeger."

"What the fuck was he doing ..."

"HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I KNOW, GOD DAMN IT??!!"

They each reached for a foot and pulled the body out. It came easily.

"He wasn't a very big fucker, was he?"

They rolled the body over and instinctively each man shown his red-lensed flashlight on the face.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Lt.!! It's just a kid! A fucking *kid*! We killed a baby buddhist monk!"

A baby buddhist monk? The Lt. thought this was hilarious and laughed. But not for long. The Lt.'s hand snaked out, grabbed the front of Jaeger's fatigue jacket, and yanked him up short, inches from the Lt's face.

"Shut up, Jaeger," he hissed, "Just shut the fuck up, will you? I don't need you starting in on me. Not here. Not now. You got that? YOU GOT IT?"

"Yes sir" was the muted reply.

They searched the body, but found nothing. They did find an empty begging bowl, though, close by.

The extraction, when it finally came off, hours and hours later, was uneventful. The body of the boy monk was left behind to rot. His memory, however, was not left behind, and it did not rot. Instead, it went along with those who left, and festered.

Jaeger was killed 3 months later, on another operation with the same lieutenant.

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