The staked Goat

bound behind them. The National Police would snug the rope just above the elbows, tugging back so hard that the elbows nearly touched, creating an image of supplicant, unisexual Venus de Milos.
    Two of my men, hit by an AK-47 in the hands of a skinny Vietnamese hiding in a dark doorway. They went down all akimbo, as if they were marionettes and someone had cut their strings. I fired three rounds into the shooter, who spun and belly-whopped on the pavement. A shadow in the next doorway moved, and I fired three more times at it. The shadow slammed back against the door, landing so that the feet were in the light. A child’s feet.
    An American nurse, blond and thin with terrible acne, stroking the face of a head-bandaged sergeant and assuring him that his eyes weren’t gone forever.
    A GI, screaming in Spanish and shooing a scrawny cat away from a dead body. The cat had been going after the corpse’s eyes. The GI started throwing up.
    A mother lying face down in the street, her eyes open, snot and blood and broken teeth all around her. Her daughter, maybe four years old, howling and beating her fists bloody on the pavement while two National Policemen stripped and looted the Viet Cong bodies in the alleyway.
    Standing in a gutter, I look down and see an arm. A black left arm. With a faded gold high school ring on the fourth finger. A blue stone.
    Two B-girls, still in their slit-sided hostess dresses, crucified on a side wall of a Tu Do Street bar for fraternizing with us, the enemy. They had been raped and slashed repeatedly. One was still alive when my sergeant put a bullet through her head. If you had seen her, you wouldn’t be asking yourself that question right now.
    An explosion that ripped through a convent school. Intentionally set, no mistaken bomb dropped randomly from above. Thirty-nine girls, aged seven through eleven, blown into a thousand once-human fragments.
    Tet. The joyous lunar new year. Auld lang syne.
     
    I rubbed my eyes. I got up and opened the conference room door. Ricker swiveled around and stood. It was 18:10. Christ, where had the time gone?
    ”More water, sir?” he asked.
    ”No thanks, Sergeant. Just stretching.”
    ”Yessir. Anything else I can get for you?”
    ”Yeah, a new set of memories.”
    He laughed respectfully. I closed the door and went back to my reading.
    Al was in the hospital until mid-February. I slowed down when I saw his name reappearing prominently.
    Al and a Sergeant Kearns brought in an acid freak named Farrell who had fragged his platoon leader. Farrell swore he would get Al, swore to God, Timothy Leary, and his mother. Farrell, Wiley N. I remembered him. One more for the list.
    Al busted a French national named Giles LeClerc who was drawing young GIs into a homosexual prostitution ring. LeClerc had a Vietnamese boyfriend and partner named Tran Dai Dinh who hadn’t been caught. The method was consistent, but a long way and a long time for a lover’s vengeance. I wrote LeClerc and Dinh down anyway.
    Al turned in an American captain of intelligence who had taken too enthusiastically to NP methods of interrogation. Bradley D. Collier. Disgraced, court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced. I fingered a photo of him. Sullen, a look of betrayal. A strong contender.
    I stumbled on a reference to one of Al’s combat assignments. When the infantry came up short on platoon leaders, the combat colonels would dip into the MP officer pool for fresh blood.
    I remembered vividly one combat mission with Al. It was a three-day, company-strength sweep maneuver skirting the jungle. The company commander was a gung-ho jerk, with a Kit Carson scout (a ”reformed” North Vietnamese regular) leading the way. I hated the jungle. I preferred anything, even the rice paddies, to it.
    The first day was uneventful. Instead of returning to base camp, of course, we bivouaced in the bush. The second day was as quiet as the first. The second night, one of my perimeter guards led Al up to my foxhole.
    ”Boy,” said Al, hunkering down when the sentry left us, ”have I got a great deal set up.”
    I looked up at him blearily. ”A deal?”
    Al checked right and left, then whispered, ”A tiger hunt!”
    ”A what?” I said, well above a whisper.
    ”Shush.” He looked around again. ”A tiger hunt. No shit, John. There used to be a lot of them around here before the war.”
    ”Al,” I said, ”there has always been a war in this country.”
    ”No, no. I mean a long time ago. Before