and came down too hard on the men under him. Perhaps his talk about
women was colored by a disquieting disrespect for them, but at first it
had seemed like the usual boring and only half-serious misogyny that you
sometimes heard from a certain number of men in any large group, Ben had
seen nothing evil about it-until later. And perhaps Sharp had been too
quick to advise against contact when the enemy was sighted and too quick
to encourage withdrawal once the enemy was engaged, but at first he
could not have been accurately labeled a coward. Yet Ben had been wary
of him and had felt somewhat guilty about it because he had no
substantial reasons for distrusting his new sergeant.
One of the things he had disliked was Sharp’s apparent lack of
convicflon in all things. Sharp seemed to have no opinions about
politics, religion, capital punishment, abortion, or any of the other
issues that interested his contemporaries. Sharp also had no strong
feelings about the war, either pro or con. He didn’t care who won, and
he regarded the quasidemocratic South and the totalitarian North as
moral equals-if he thought about it at all in moral terms. He had
joined the Marines to avoid being drafted into the Army, and he felt
none of that leatherneck pride or commitment that made the corps a home
to most of the other men in it. He intended to have a military career,
though what drew him to the service was not duty or pride but the hope
of promotion to a position of real power, early retirement in just
twenty years, and a generous pension, he could talk for hours about
military pensions and benefits.
He had no special passion for music, art, books, sports, hunting,
fishing, or anything dsexcept for himself.
He himself was his own-and only-passion. Though not a hypochondriac, he
was certainly obsessed with the state of his health and would talk at
length about his digestion, his constipation or lack of it, and the
appearance of his morning stool. Another man might simply say, “I have
a splitting headache,” but Anson Sharp, plagued by a similar condition,
would expend two hundred words describing the degree and nature of the
agony in excruciating detail and would use a finger to trace the precise
line of the pain across his brow. He spent a lot of time combing his
hair, always managed to be clean-shaven even under battle conditions,
had a narcissistic attraction to mirrors and other reflective surfaces,
and made a virtual crusade of obtaining as many creature comforts as a
soldier could manage in a war zone.
It was difficult to like a man who liked nothing but himself.
But if Anson Sharp had been neither a good nor an evil man when he had
gone to Nam-just bland and self-centered-the war had worked upon the
unformed clay of his personality and had gradually sculpted a monster.
When Ben became aware of detailed and convincing rumors of Sharp’s
involvement in the black market, an investigation had turned up proof of
an astonishing criminal career. Sharp had been involved in the
hijacking of goods in transit to post exchanges and canteens, and he had
negotiated the sale of those stolen supplies to buyers in the Saigon
underworld.
Additional information indicated that, while not a user or direct seller
of drugs, Sharp facilitated the commerce in illegal substances between
the Vietnamese Mafia and U.S. soldiers. Most shocking of all, Ben’s
sleuthing led to the discovery that Sharp used some profits from
criminal activity to keep a fred-a-terre in Saigon’s roughest nightclub
district, there, with the assistance of an exceedingly vicious
Vietnamese thug who served as a combination houseboy and dungeon master,
Sharp maintained an eleven-year-old girl-Mai Van Trangas a virtual
slave, sexually abusing her whenever he had the opportunity, oterwise
leaving her to the mercy of the thug.
The inevitable court-martial had not proceeded as predictably as Ben
hoped. He wanted to put Sharp away for twenty years in a military
prison. But before the case came to trial, potential witnesses began to
die or disappear at an alarming pace. Two Army noncomspushers
who’dagreed to testify against Sharp in return for lenient