第20章 The New Column

Day forty-two. They came off the western face at about the eighth hour in a wind out of the north-east, in daylight, past a scraped circle in the scrub at about the fifth kilometre and a second one at the sixth, and neither pit was of any interest to any of them, because a man who stops and looks at a battery position is a man who has been in a battery position. At about the fourteenth hour they were on a cart track four hundred metres above the beach, and the sea was grey and flat and there was a town on it, and there was an airstrip in the town, and on the strip there were two aircraft, and one of them was being loaded. Sant had left the board at about the tenth hour. He had gone up that ridge in daylight, in the first dry afternoon of a monsoon, past a man two hundred metres below him who did not look up, and he had put a piece of ration board under a stone on a shelf where an observation post had been scraped out in 1941, and there were two lines on it and no grid, and on the other side of the second line there was one word, and the word was *counted*. He did not tell anybody on the way down what the man had done. He told Captain Ito at the track, and the captain looked at him for a while, and then said, "All right," and nothing else, and that was the whole of the report. The outfit on the strip was a Marine company at a place that had a name on a sheet in An Thuc and no name at all in the village, and they had a doctor, and the doctor took the colonel into a tent and worked on him for two hours over a foot that had been going bad since the eighth of June, and a staff sergeant came out of the tent at the end of it and said to Captain Ito: "Who is he?" "He is a colonel of the Republic of Vietnam." The sergeant looked at the tent for a second. "Was," he said. "Was," said Ito. Nobody asked another question about it, then or afterwards, and that is the whole of what a Marine company on a strip in the second week of June of 1965 did about a Vietnamese colonel with a bad foot and a wet jacket and no papers, and Ito has said since that it was the single most professional thing that happened to him in nine weeks. They were in the town for six days. On the third day a lieutenant from the company asked him, at a table on the veranda, whether the valley above the town had any villages in it, and whether there was a road along the north wall, and whether a battery had ever been cut into the wall. "There are four villages," said Ito. "I passed two of them. There is a road along the north wall. I have not seen a battery." It was a lie of about four words and it took him eleven seconds to tell, and he did not tell it well, and he thought about it every day for the rest of his life. On the sixth day they flew out of the strip at nine in the morning, and Rafe went out with the last load of the company, and there was nothing in his pockets, because the set was in a river in a snag in a country he was never going to see again, and there was a metre of aerial missing and nineteen pounds of army equipment in a tin box, and he was twenty-two years old and he had asked for a radio operator to be allowed to carry a map once, in a life that had had a great deal in it that he could not talk about. The report took him nine weeks. It was four pages and it went up through a major, who read it, and a lieutenant-colonel, who read it, and a colonel, who read it, and it was filed, and it was not believed, and a great deal of it was not supposed to be believed, and the reason nobody has ever been able to explain the fact that a battery on the north wall of the valley of the blind river was found in September of 1965 is that it is not explained anywhere in any file at all. The survey party went up the valley in September. It was four men and a Vietnamese guide and a theodolite on a truck, and it took them eleven days, and they found the road on the north wall and both pits and a scraped shoulder, and the man who wrote the report was a captain who was thirty-four and who had not been there, and he corrected the schedule on the fourteenth of September, and the corrected schedule went down to An Thuc on the seventeenth, and there is a copy of it in a box in a room with a fan in it. It puts the river at the foot of the northern slope. It puts the road on the wall. It puts the pits on the wall. And in the margin of the corrected sheet, in pencil, in a hand that is not the survey party's and is not the guide's, somebody has written one line, and there is a stone on a shelf two hundred metres above a drainage on a ridge to the north-west, and a boy of nineteen under four inches of scrub with a dry shirt folded inside his jacket, and a piece of ration board with two lines on it and one word, and a day in the middle of a monsoon when a very large number of things were counted. The line says: *the count was right, and it was eight, and it was counted on the fortieth of May, and none of them has ever been found.*