1966. American casualties in the field.
The second wave of major work coincides with the dedication of the Wall and the oral history boom. Interest in the war and the veteran peaked here, between 1982 and 1987. In addition to works written by veterans and directly addressing the war and its immediate issues, a surprising number of literary and mainstream novels and story collections by nonveteran writers included veterans as emblematic characters and used the Vietnam experience as either backdrop or backstory. The vet had become an American character in his or her own right, the experience shared with the rest of the country. This of course had its pitfalls, in that the gap between veterans and civilians was still in effect, and often authors unfamiliar with the territory gave the reader the same old clichéd vets and overwrought atrocities, only this time with the understanding that the reader’s sympathies would be with the veteran.
The second wave also marks the last time American mainstream publishing would consider Vietnam a viable commercial subject, at least in fiction. After 1988, the number of new Vietnam novels released by major houses dwindled to a trickle. The time to celebrate the veteran and question the war, it seemed, was up.
The 13th Valley, 101st Airborne vet John M. Del Vecchio’s first novel, is a large, sometimes sprawling attempt at a realist epic. The book follows the men of Alpha company during a large-scale operation in 1970. A best seller in 1982, it relies on an avalanche of technical detail and a modicum of heavy symbolism. Del Vecchio uses maps and official after-action reports to augment his storyline; he contrasts the unemotional, euphemistic language of the official version with his grunts’ ground-level view of combat.
Stephen Wright served in Army Intelligence in 1969-70. His Meditations in Green (1983) is a dense, metaphorical novel that looks at the rear-echelon Vietnam experience of Spec. 4 James Griffin and his equally strange existence as a heroin user after the war. This is a selfconsciously literary book, an ornate, high-energy performance. Wright’s use of both form and language is startling, and Griffin’s position and skewed view of the world gives the author space to make funny and cutting observations about America. His first book, Meditations immediately established Wright as a literary novelist.
Larry Heinemann, like Oliver Stone a veteran of the Army’s 25th Infantry Division, had already published a Vietnam novel before Paco’s Story (1986). His first book, Close Quarters (1977), was for the most part realism, but, like Wright, in Paco’s Story Heinemann chose a more literary style. The novel follows the horribly scarred Paco, the sole survivor of his platoon, as he travels through small-town America, trying to find a place for himself. He keeps to himself in his rented room, where he’s visited nightly by memories of the war. None of this would be remarkable, but Heinemann has chosen for his narrator the dead platoon, speaking like a jive chorus from beyond the grave. It casts Paco’s mundane return to the world in both a comic and tragic light, and lets Heinemann—in the combined voices of the dead—tear into the reading audience, openly teasing them with a litany of tall tales and overblown clichés they may believe because they’re so gullible. It’s a virtuoso performance which earned Heinemann the National Book Award.
The second wave operates differently, in that it assumes its audience has some familiarity with the war—and in Heinemann’s case, with the literature of the war. Work in the second wave has to do more than simply contain some truth about the war and a litany of facts. While Del Vecchio overwhelms the reader with the sheer size and scope of his project, Wright gives us a near-hallucinatory vision of both America and Vietnam, a satire of the technological country at war with all of nature. Heinemann goes even further, at once parodying and fulfilling the vet-comes-home story, all the while castigating the reader and America (hilariously) for being so stupid. His opening section is a clever, self-conscious dissection of the very act of telling Vietnam stories—who does it and why, and who does or doesn’t want to read them. Most folks will shell out to see artful carnage, his narrator says, and how can we refute him?
The focus here, as usual, is not merely on Vietnam, but on the relationship between the veteran and America, between the war and the American public, and between men and women. By the early eighties, the fictional veteran may still be a loner, but he’s trying to find a way to belong, even—as in Paco’s case—when he knows he doesn’t.
It was two hours past midnight. The moon was rising behind fast tumbling clouds and the sky was illuminated with eerie turbulence. The ground fog was thick and sticky. Alpha was in column, moving, stumbling, bitching. They had humped off the east side of the peak, then, following a compass course, they circled the peak to the south then west and finally northwest where they picked up the trail along the flat ridge down through the shallow draw and up toward the isolated peak that 2d Plt had reconned with helicopter at point the previous afternoon. From there until they reached their objective eleven days away the inertia of their forward motion would keep them in motion, never stopping, never slowing, gradually accelerating in their spiral descent into hell.
The path of Alpha’s movement was very dark because of the ground mist. The soldiers felt insecure moving in the blackness, feeling their way toward a possible ambush. They bitched. They were tired. They had been working since before dawn. They had stopped long enough to dig in and set up and now they were moving through the unknown.
Night vision is a gift but a gift which each receiver must develop. Brooks had excellent night vision as did Jackson and Numbnuts Willis, who never let anyone know. Part of the ambient knowledge within the infantry was how to exploit the gift. To see at night it is necessary to look NOT directly at the object of sight but to look left or right of it about 15°. That way the image passing through the eye’s lens hits the side of the retina where the rods, black/white receptors, are concentrated and not the center of the retina where the cones, color receptors, are clustered. Cherry knew all this but he had never practiced it before and on the night march he was nearly blind. Oh God. Oh God. This is fucked. Oh God, this is fucked. He was shaking.
As important as night vision is kinesthesis, the ability to comprehend the signals of the muscles, tendons and joints and to know the precise location and movement of one’s body and bodily components. It is through the understanding of those sensory experiences one knows one’s environment and one’s position in it. Cherry knew this also. He had had enough psychology and physiology classes to know in detail the theories and even the history of their development. But the knowledge without practice was nearly useless.
Egan had scant knowledge of the theory of night vision and only slightly more knowledge of kinesthesis. But Egan was a mole. He had an immense amount of practice in night moving and he took considerable pride in his ability. He asked, volunteered, cajoled and forced the L-T to allow him to walk point. Behind him was Pop Randalph and behind them the bitching was universal.
The column was in a black cave of unknowns. They groped for the contours of the trail, the slope, the holes, the protruding roots. They stumbled forward in a long line, trying to be silent, listening to the swishing soundlessness of the good infantrymen, listening to the quick slip, topple—“Ooooophs, oh shit! Fuck this, Man”—of the bad. They followed Egan into dips and over crests, generally downward toward the valley then generally upward toward the peak.
As they moved in column Egan thought of the NVA soldiers who would also be moving now. Bitching, he thought, just like these assholes. Every army’s made up of assholes. They’re the only fuckers dumb enough to fight. It gave him strength because he was not bitching. It made him feel secure and superior and happy. Egan thought about the NVA sergeants and lieutenants who surely had to be leading equally unwilling, lazy, scared NVA soldiers. They’re just like us. Egan felt warm. He felt warmth for the bitching assholes he was leading and warmth for the NVA assholes being lead toward him. Only one thing ruined Egan’s night march, spider webs. Spider webs seemed to cross his path a hundred times.
Pop Randalph at Egan’s slack was oblivious to everything. His body behaved perfectly, mechanically, without his consciousness. His eyes saw nothing but black void and only if the void were disturbed would his mind register. 2d Plt followed, then the company CP, 3d Plt and 1st at rear security. In the middle of 1st Cherry stumbled along swearing, one hand on Lt. Thomaston’s ruck before him, one holding his M-16. He could feel the edginess of the others about him, the fear of being ambushed.
Behind Cherry Jackson was raging pissed. What that fuckin Marcus think I ken do? Jax snarled wildly in the dark. He think I ken jest git up an walk away. Where to? Fucka. An who gowin listen ta me if I says, Throw down yo weapons Brotha Boonierats. The word has come, Marcus has declared this war ended.’ Mothafuckin dinks id love it. Walk right up en fuck everyone a us up. Then whut I got to be proud a? Pap sick, huh? Dat too bad. Aint my fault. Fucka tryin make me feel guilt. Can’t that mothafucka Marcus see? Can’t he see? Hey! I’s somebody. I aint no nigger-slave soldier. I’s somebody out here. He jest aint seen them people in Hue or Phu Luong. I am here fightin for freedom an justice an I’s somebody. That the difference, Mista Marcus. I’s really important here, dig? This the first time I ever been somebody. Every fucka here depend on me, depend on Jax keepin the gooks from comin through his side a the perimeter. That aint no shit. And when I comes home, stand back! That’s right Mista. Pap’ll be proud. He proud now. I know. An ef the revolution do come, I am ready. I am trained. I am experienced. I am ready to lead my company fo my people gainst any mothafuckin white honky pig.
Cherry entered a tiny clearing. The velvet dark below the canopy was a void: no light, no brush, no breeze, no sound. The column had stopped. The bitching had stopped. He had lost hand contact with Thompson’s ruck. No one was holding him from behind. He stood still, exhausted, too tired to be frightened anymore, too tired to make the effort to sit. Everything had vanished. The men of Company A had melted into the mist and moist humus of the trail.
“We’re NDPing here,” Egan’s whisper oozed from the void. “Settle down right there. G’m goina check the squads. Make sure we got everybody.”
Cherry nodded. He walked forward several steps and bumped into Thomaston. He stepped back, set his ruck down quietly, removed his helmet and sat down. Egan’s whisper oozed from the void again. “Just rest, I got first radio watch. We’re set up in a straight line on the trail.” Egan grabbed Cherry’s right arm, shook it gently. “There’s our people behind you”—he pushed Cherry’s body—“and up that way.” He rocked Cherry back and forth. “This way here or that way there, if you see somebody, shoot ’em. I’ll be back in one-five.”
Cherry sat very still. He was very tired and the thick mist had condensed to make him soggy. He was too tired to fear an enemy probe yet a chill ran over his shoulders and across his neck. He closed his eyes. He could see the face of the enemy soldier he had shot. The face would not leave him alone. The soldier moved cautiously, slowly. Cherry stared into the man’s dark eyes. Cherry shook his head, looked elsewhere. The eyes stayed before him. The soldier was looking directly back at Cherry. Surely he could see Cherry behind the bush aiming his M-16 directly at the soldier’s face. The face came forward, the eyes twinkled, a smile came to the man’s lips. The image of the black post of the M-16 sight covered the man’s mouth. The man laughed. The face enlarged, the eyes were wild, frenzied. Cherry stared back, growled, slowly squeezed the trigger of his weapon. The gun barked explosively, the muzzle flashing, the soldier’s head …
“Hey! Cherry!” It was Egan. “Come with me. Bring the radio. L-T wants your radio to the CP.”
How can one explain the anticipation, the tremendous suspense and expectation of R&R. It affects every move, every thought. Perhaps the old system of being in for the duration is better. Brooks had been a platoon leader with Bravo Company, 7/402, for five months when he left the boonies for R&R. In those last days of December 1969, it had been for him as if every effort, every night in the monsoon slime, every incoming round was endured solely for the reward of spending six nights away from Nam, six nights with Lila. Brooks had not had any specific expectations before he left, just the general anticipation of his sweet lady in a Hawaiian wonderland.
It began as he expected. He savored the very first passionate kiss in ten months, savored her lips as they embraced. They neither noticed nor would they have cared that the scene was repeated a hundred times about them by a hundred soldiers and soldiers’ wives. Brooks was speechless. God, she was warm. They kissed and embraced and kissed and embraced and in the taxi leaving the airport for their hotel they devoured each other, not even noticing the demonstrators greeting the arrivals from Vietnam with their shouted chant:
HEY BABYKILLER, PLEASE
SHOOT YOURSELF, NOT VIETNAMESE.
But in all the anticipation, all the expectation, there is no thought, no preparation. That comes later, after the return to Nam, comes while trying to piece together what happened. For Lieutenant Rufus Brooks it was a dreaded thought with dreamlike qualities but not truly a dream for he would be conscious and he could run from the thoughts and hide in his work. During the night march the thoughts of R&R overpowered the concerns of work, overran the fleeting intellectualizations on conflict. The thought condensed to one day, a repetition of each day of his life as if time were a record with a scratch and on each revolution the needle jumped back to the same day, the same horrid day.
The beginning of the day was glorious. When they finally broke away from each other long enough to speak, Rufus held Lila at arm’s length and softly cooed, “Let me look at you.” She giggled and breathed back, “And you. You’ve lost so much weight. Aren’t they taking care of you?”
“I’m fine,” Rufus said squeezing her again. He wanted to sprint upstairs to their room. He squeezed her tightly and she squeezed him back. He could feel the soft firmness of her breasts through his uniform, the warmth of her thighs against his legs. Rufus had always had a strong hard body but the months of field duty had made his legs tighter, harder, had flattened his belly and made his chest more solid. Lila stroked his arms, his back, his neck. He felt alive again, vibrant.
He held her at arm’s length again. “Hey, what’s this?” he asked. “What’d you do to your eyes?”
“Do you like them?”
“Hey, they’re green. What’d you do? You don’t have green eyes.”
Lila raised her eyebrows flashing her sparkling eyes at him, smiling, teasing and tempting him. “Colored contacts,” she grinned. Rufus pulled her to him, squeezed, then held her at arm’s length again and covered her shoulders with his huge hands, massaging gently, lightly feeling the tops of her breasts with his thumbs. Lila’s eyes were beautiful but they made him feel uneasy, as if he did not know her.
“Should we, ah, get a drink or something?” he asked anxiously. “Tell me everything that’s been happening to you.”
“Let’s just go upstairs,” she whispered coyly. “Let’s go upstairs.” He ran his hand down her back to her small solid round buttocks. “Ooooh, Rufus! Please! Not here. People are looking. Let’s go upstairs and get you out of that uniform. I bought you some clothes this morning.”
Upstairs they leaped to the bed. Rufus pulled at Lila’s clothes wildly, festively, feverishly. Lila twisted and turned helping him. She covered her breasts with her hands. She stroked her nipples. He ripped his own shirt exposing the strong shoulders and chest, the powerful neck and arms. She ran her hands down her thighs, hungry for him, wanting to feel his weight on her. He pulled at her panties and she raised her thighs, brought her knees up allowing him to whisk the last stitch of cloth away. She covered her body coquettishly, eyes sparkling, smiling, giggling as he tore his pants off. She squealed and squiggled and feinted squeamish shock at his exposure. And they made love. They loved each other over and over.
To her, he had never felt so wonderful, so warm, so light yet so firm. He had never moved so smoothly. He had never touched her in so many places simultaneously. To him her mouth had never been so sweet, her tongue so sensual. Her excitement rose higher, higher, faster, tauter.
“Oooooo,” she groaned. “Oooh Rufus, Rufus, Rufus. Oooh Rufus. Make me pregnant.” Love exploded from her. “Make me pregnant. Oooh Rufus. I want all of you.”
“Oh my sweet Lila, I love you so. I love you so much. I’ve missed you so much. Lila. Lila.”
Rufus had never been so excited, Lila never so exciting. The nearness of her wonderful glowing body, the newness, renewedness of their love was overwhelming. They relaxed, kissed, lay in the bed. She teased him, tickled his side, kissed his scrotum. Nibbling at him she watched his excitement rise. He ran his fingers down her back onto her ass. He followed his fingers with his tongue. Lila lay on her back and he kissed her body, her proud body. She arched her back as he mouthed her breasts, licked and rolled the nipples with his tongue. Their passion had never known the variety. They loved again and again and then they relaxed.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” Lila said. “There’s so much to see and do. Let’s not waste any time doing nothing.”
Rufus agreed fully. It was wonderful. It was wonderful having her to make the decisions. He gave himself to her totally, trustingly. “Lila,” he confessed, “I’ve thought about you so much. All the time. You’re on my mind all the time.” It was as if he needed her to carry him now. “You’re everything to me,” he said. With the last sentence he felt he had made a mistake, had given too much, even to a wife. Lila did not return his loneliness confession with one of her own.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” she said laying her head on his chest. They did not say anything for several minutes. Rufus felt pleasantly tired. Yet he was anxious. He thought about his platoon, about each of the men in his platoon. He chose his words carefully, trying to be lighthearted, “I wonder,” he said, “where those poor bastards are sleeping tonight?” Lila rose up on her forearms on his chest and looked into his eyes. He avoided her gaze. “This is the first real bed,” he chuckled, “I’ve been in in ten months. I’ve slept in my clothes on the ground ever since July when I went to the Oh-deuce.”
“Is it bad?” Lila asked sympathetically.
“No. That part’s not bad,” Rufus said. “I was just wondering where they were. It’s raining there now and we’re in the mountains.” He changed his tone to sound more cheerful. “It’s wonderful to be here with you.”
“Rufus,” she asked. He knew what was coming. Every one in Nam who had returned from R&R said wives always asked it on the first night. “Rufus,” Lila asked. She put her head down on his chest again. “Have you killed anyone?”
He paused and sighed. He took a deep breath. “Why don’t you ask me if I’ve saved anyone’s life?” he said.
“L-T. Bravo’s gettin hit.” It was El Paso. He had been monitoring all three CP radios while Cahalan and Brown slept. A light rain had begun falling. It was very cool and a shiver ran up Brooks’ back. Sporadic rifle shots cracked from across the valley. Bravo Company had been inserted on the north escarpment of the Khe Ta Laou on the 13th, had moved north, uphill and NDPed. On the 14th day they had engaged three NVA soldiers in a brief firefight and had pursued them south across their insertion LZ toward the valley. The Bravo troops had lost the NVA trail and had returned to the LZ for their NDP. They were now north northwest of Alpha by 2½ kilometers with only lower hills and the valley between. More rifles chattered. The NVA were probing Bravo first from one side then another. A few frags exploded.
“Put everyone on alert,” Brooks directed El Paso. “Monitor Bravo’s internal and have Egan’s cherry bring his radio up here.”
An illumination flare popped above Bravo’s position. Then another and another. Several popped over the center of the valley. The light pierced the canopy and fell eerily upon the boonierats of Company A. Brooks hated calling for illumination. The light fell indiscriminately, silhouetting enemy and friendly forces alike. Usually US forces NDPed on high ground and the illumination actually helped the NVA kill more Americans then vice versa.
El Paso, Cahalan and Brown along with Doc, Minh and FO clustered low close about Brooks. “We’re going to run into a lot of shit in this AO,” FO said quietly to the RTOs.
“I hope we don’t get hit by mortars again,” Brown said. “I hate those fucken things.”
“Anything comin at you is bad shit,” El Paso said. Artillery from Barnett began firing Bravo’s DTs.
“Down south,” FO said getting everyone’s attention, “we used to use a doughnut. We’d use a full brigade to encircle the enemy just before dark. All night long they’d pour in artillery and air strikes. The dinks’d try to move out. In the morning we’d go in and mop up.”
Egan and Cherry joined the CP circle. Egan had led Cherry to the CP during a break from the illumination. Cherry slapped at a mosquito. Egan grabbed his hand. “Keep the fuckin noise down,” he snarled. Doc handed Cherry a small plastic bottle of insect repellent. Cherry squirted some into his hands and wiped it on his face and neck and passed it back. It passed around the circle. The mosquitos had come out with the rain.
Nine men with four radios sat quietly listening to the valley noises and to the faint rushing air sound of the radios. The probe of Bravo had slackened. It had lasted less than ten minutes. The artillery crews on Barnett ceased shooting illumination and DTs for Bravo and returned to the random H & I fire, the blasts rumbling and echoing in the dark. It seemed peaceful. Cherry had not slept when the column stopped. He had not rested before the night move. With the security of being at the center of the company and surrounded by eight others he tried to close his eyes. It was peaceful.
A new sound entered the night. It was that most horrible of sounds, the light concussion of air non-sound, a mortar being fired. And everyone of them knew it was not friendly mortars. They had no sister units that close, in that direction, below them east in the valley. FO, Egan and Brooks instinctively pulled out lensmatic compasses and fixed on the sound. Everyone else froze. There was no place to move. No holes had been dug. Along the column men, already on the ground, lay flatter, condensed their bodies. Sweat sprouted in beads on foreheads, phaffft. Hearts slowing, eyes widening, balls clinging, climbing, rectums constricting and sphincters clamping down in anticipation, phaffft. phaffft. Ten times. Twelve times. Ears like radar searching the sky. Then lightning bursts in the mist and karrumph … karrumph … Flashes across the valley, karrumph. karrumph.
Radios crackled lowly. Panicked voices could be heard. “Bravo’s FO is hit,” Cahalan reported. Rounds continued to explode at Bravo’s location. Twelve, sixteen, twenty times. “They got three dudes hit.” Then rifles chattered. AKs, RPD machine guns clattered and were answered by M-16s and M-60s. The fire intensified. Hand grenades and RPGs and thumpers exchanged percussion. The howitzers on Barnett reacted firing Bravo’s DTs. “Drop one hundred, left fifty.” The caller was working the howitzer rounds around his perimeter.
Amid the explosions and the continuous small arms cacophony came the popping sounds of the NVA mortar tube below Company A. The enemy mortar team was firing furiously. Brooks grabbed Cahalan’s handset, threw it back and scrambled for Brown’s. He keyed the handset bar furiously, interrupting Bravo’s artillery adjustments. “Armageddon Two, Armageddon Two, this is Quiet Rover Four, over.” He unkeyed. “Come on you bastard, I got a fix on the tube.” Brooks keyed again. “Armageddon …” He paused. Everyone else had frozen. The twelve howitzers on Barnett were all firing. The booming from Barnett and the explosions across the valley increased. Brooks violently shoved the handset into FO’s hand. “Get Arty. Tell ’em you hear the tube. Tell ’em you’ll adjust by sound.” El Paso covered Brooks with a poncho and Egan produced a flashlight and topo map. They could still hear the NVA mortar rounds being launched. “We are receiving in-coming mortars at our sierra,” an RTO in the TOC bunker on Barnett reported. “Firebase gettin hit,” FO reported to the group. FO reached the FDC at Barnett. He calmly explained the situation. “Armageddon Two, Rover Four. Fire mission. Over.” FO gave the direction and approximate location of the target as Egan and Brooks deciphered the coordinates from the map. FO casually suggested the type of projectile and fuse action and adjustment. Then he added, “Now fo Gawd sakes fire the Gawddamned thing.”
“Stand by for shot,” the radio rasped.
“Standin by,” FO said coolly.
The popping sound had stopped. It now began popping again, popping over and over. Again the boonierats of Alpha clung to the earth. Had the NVA mortar team adjusted to their, Alpha’s, position? The small arms fire from Bravo never ceased.
“Shot out,” the radio rasped.
FLASH! KARRUMP! The first NVA mortar rounds exploded, the noise following the flash by half a breath. Flash! KARRUMP! Flash! KARRUMP! Flash! KARRUMP!
“Shee-it,” Doc smiled.
The howitzer round from Barnett exploded near to where the sound of the popping tube had come. “Right fifty,” FO called. “Yo on the money. Fire for effect.”
KARRUMP! The NVA mortar rounds were exploding on Alpha’s old NDP, on their locations of three hours earlier. “Shee-it,” Doc laughed. He turned to Minh and punched him on the shoulder. Up and down the column troops were breathing easier.
KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Six US 105mm howitzer rounds exploded in the valley very close below Company A. The entire peak rocked. KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Another volley exploded. “Get ’em, Arty.” Another volley. The earth shook. Rifle fire was still clattering from Bravo’s position. KARABABOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM! Silent cheers arose, imaginary banners waved. Silent bands played. The cavalry rode across ninety unseeable TV screens. The pioneers were saved.
The frequency of artillery explosions in the valley increased. The 105s from Barnett were joined by huge 175mm and eight-inch howitzers from distant firebases. The small arms clatter at Bravo ceased, then erupted, then ceased again. It settled down to sporadic crackings in the wet drizzle night sky.
“Bravo’s requesting an emergency Dust-Off,” Cahalan reported to the group.
“No fucken way, Man,” Brown said.
“How in fuck they gonna get them dudes out?” Doc whispered angrily. “How they gonna get a bird inta the middle a dis mothafuck?”
“Their FO’s dead,” Cahalan said. “They got three urgent, one priority, one tactical urgent. And their FO.”
“Oh this fucken valley,” El Paso said. “It’s socked in tighter en shit in yer ass when hell’s rainin down.”
Cherry’s hands and legs were quivering. He had his radio on company internal freq and monitored the routine sit-reps from his squads and the other platoon CPs. His whole body shook. Oh God. Don’t let any of us get blown away. Please God.
The sounds of the valley diminished. The small arms fire at Bravo’s location ceased. The NVA mortar tube was silent. US artillery slowed but continued to erupt in the valley. Waiting dragged heavily.
“How will they get the wounded out?” Cherry whispered to Egan.
“They’ll get ’em,” Egan said. “Medevac pilots got big brass balls.”
Doc Johnson was sick, nauseous. The inability to help, to affect the situation at all, always made him ill with frustration and anger. You trah, trah, trah, Doc thought, an what it get you? You trah bein good, doin right, an it doan change a fucken thing, Mista. Not a fucken thing. It was the same in the rear and the lowlands as it was in the boonies. It was even the same back in the World.
Doc was a large dark brown man, large and heavy for an infantryman. He had a large head and fuzzy black coarse hair and a scant fuzzy moustache that came to the corners of his mouth and curled back into itself. His chin was covered with coarse stubble. Over his left eye there was a deep scar, pink against his deep brown skin, that ran to the bridge of his nose and obliterated the eyebrow. In all, Doc had a heavy thick look which many people automatically associated with slowness, dullness and dumbness.
Doc, Sergeant Alexander Vernon Johnson, was a city black. He was born and rasied in New York, Manhattan, up at 143d Street with a turf extending from the Hudson River east across all of Harlem, mixed neighborhoods, mixed ghetto of Puerto Ricans and blacks, some whites, old Irish and Jewish remnants. Doc’s family had been lured from the South in the 1920s by the prospect of high-paying employment in the factories of the northeast, lured with tens of thousands of southern blacks migrating for a better life. Long before he was born, in 1949, his people had settled into a pattern of male nomadic job searching and broken matriarchal families. Alexander was raised by a woman who was not his mother in a family where the siblings were not blood brothers and sisters in a street culture which was more tribal than cognatic. Alexander had no father but many fathers, no mother but many mothers and no siblings but brothers and sisters everywhere on the turf.
For a boy growing up in the city, the street was a good place, the best place. Inside it was dull, dingy gray close and dirty with age, the kind of dirt cleaning does not affect. Inside was where the winos laid in the hallways, where the roaches spawned in the moisture beneath sinks and behind tipping commodes. Inside the paint had all yellowed and cracked and chipped, and the plaster walls and ceilings had cracks running like veins in science book pictures of the human body. In the street there was handball and stickball and stoopball, and over at the school there was basketball. On the street the buildings had color and the walls carried ads for skin bleach and hair straightener. On the street there was music and dance. The street never, never was completely dark.
Street life connotates a harsh nastiness to the uninitiated but to a boy who knew the street it was communal, pleasant. Alexander knew from very early on that someone or thing would watch out for his welfare by forcing him to school or by rapping with him when he needed a man to talk to or by protecting him when a rival gang invaded his turf. He was an inner-city poor black child who did not know he was poor and who scoffed at the social worker’s condescension. For a time he was a city cowboy, a small time street hustler, good friend, bad enemy.
Alexander was the kind of teenager his country calls first when it needs men for war, the kind of man his country, even its military, rejects when there is no need for strong hands to carry rifles and strong backs to carry the dead.
So it was with Alexander Johnson in 1966. At seventeen, his country decided it would like to use his services. Perhaps he was lucky to have had a brother advise him to enlist for a school instead of simply being drafted or perhaps he was wise enough to accept the advice or perhaps it was the vein-cracked walls and the science book diagram, for Alexander signed up for four years and a guarantee of medical corps training. Perhaps that was not luck at all.
When Alexander left New York for basic training in early ’67, he thought New York would be an easy place to forget, the kind of place a man turns from easily. But almost immediately he missed his home, his siblings and his sister who was not his sister at all: his delightful little sister Marlena, three months apart in age and always together.
When Alexander came home after basic training and before he was shipped to Texas for twenty-six weeks of medical training, he spent his week’s leave on the streets with old friends, but mostly he spent time with Marlena. One evening they had come through the streets and upon a street meeting. There were lots of young children running about and older people on the stoops sitting and talking and some older men sitting together drinking wine and several hard-looking women standing by the curb watching the street. It was late March and it was warm for the first time since the January thaw. Down the block, away from the meeting, Puerto Rican punks were playing stickball with stones, trying to clear the street and hit the windows in the buildings on the far side with their triples and homers.
On the center stoop there were two sisters and three brothers. One sister raised up her arms and started to sing and the others joined in. Marlena’s eyes lit as she watched and listened and Alexander watched her as she watched the meeting.
A white couple approached, crossed the street and passed, then recrossed the street and continued on their way. “Look at them folk,” Marlena sighed, “all dressed up in their white skin and their threads just so. That make me sad.”
“That jus crazy,” Alexander said. “White folk is crazy. I’ll tell you bout them in Basic. Lena, white folk is a crazy cluster.”
Marlena slipped her arm around Alexander’s waist and he put his arm about her shoulder and they looked at each other and gave each other a squeeze and she said, “Let’s go listen to some sounds and maybe do some boogyin.”
The schools for army medics in San Antonio lasted from twelve to forty weeks depending upon the specialty. Draftees with two year commitments generally were run through a short course that concentrated on basic combat first aid—traumatic amputation, sucking chest wounds, shock. Enlistees, Regular Army personnel with more promising service length, were trained in all the various medical fields from operating room technicians to physical therapists. For most, when their schooling was over, their first duty assignment placed them with medical detachments attached to combat units; they became grunt medics. It was thus with Alexander, twenty-six weeks of intensive medical training followed by a month’s leave and a year with the First Cavalry Division, November ’67 to November ’68, in I Corps, the Republic of Vietnam, as a grunt with a big bag of medical supplies.
During the time of his paramedical training it was discovered that Marlena was suffering from a blood disease of the sickle-cell syndrome, a lethal disease where increasing numbers of red blood cells deform, become excessively fragile and finally burst in great numbers releasing toxins into the victim’s system. Treating the symptoms can elongate a victim’s life but the disease is painful, unstoppable and incurable.
After a year with the Cav, Doc was assigned to the RNV training school at Fort Riley, Kansas, an assignment stimulating at first but terribly isolated and finally completely unacceptable.
In July of ’69 Marlena died from untreated internal lung ulcerations and the complications of pneumonia. She died as much from lack of treatment as from the disease. “Died, Mothafucka,” Doc had screamed in drunk nauseous vomiting when he’d heard, “cause she was a beautiful black lady inheritin bad genes from some badass fucka seven thousand years ago. Died cause them people, my people, don’t yet know that they don’t have ta die.” On request, Doc was transferred back to Vietnam and in December of ’69 he was assigned to the 326th Medical Battalion Detachment attached to the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile).
During the early months of his second tour Doc was in charge of the Oh-deuce MEDCAPs, Medical Civil Assistance Program. He and another medic and an interpreter and usually one or two boonierats temporarily in from the bush would go from hamlet to hamlet on a scheduled route. They tried to visit each of their eleven assigned hamlets once every week to ten days. At first that had given Doc Johnson a great deal of satisfaction but then the despair, the depression, the nausea set in. Doc Johnson once described it to El Paso.
“There one thing, Mista, you gotta know first,” Doc had said. “It’s old age that hold traditional Vietnamese society together. You remember Quay, one fine Marvin de ARVN? Quay was my interpreter for three months. He tell me how the Buddhist and the Taoist and the Confucianist all hold there to be a proper order in the universe. Like that’s their religion. Ya know what I mean? Everybody gotta respect the old cause that’s their proper place. You doan never be sarcastic to a old papa-san. He is like the man, the key of their social structure.
“We go to a ville like Luong Vinh. There’d be dogs layin outside and baby-sans runnin around naked amongst the grass shacks. We go up to the school buildin which our own engineers built a corrugated steel in the center of the ville and Quay’d look for the village chief.
“Mista, people’d jam inta that tin shack ta see me. They be round the corner standin in line. All a ’em barefoot. Quay’d go out, explain to ’em that I’d see all the baby-sans first, then the mamas with small children and then the old. People be standin on tiptoes ta see what I doin. Be jus like a circus tent. I’m maybe about done. Some old lady come up an I know she got TB or pneumonia and she gonna die. So I give her maybe some vitamins or somethin cause I know I can’t do nothin fo her. Or an old man come up and talk to Quay and Quay, he say to me, ‘Doc, you give this man some medicine. He an old man. He have no money. He need something to trade fo food.’ Like that.
“Then I realized it, Mista. You understand what I’m sayin? There a reign a terror in them villes. It aint the Cong. It aint the NVA. It’s the cowboys. All these young bucks who aint been drafted yet. They like a gang back on the block cept worse. They approach, little kids dee-dee. Mama-sans run. I give this one old man some Sing tô, vitamins, and some nitrofurizone fo ringworm. He leave the school house an four wiseass cowboys take half a what I give’m. They rough him up tee-tee then let’m go. Like a protection racket, Mista. The old man whimper his shit ta some baby-sans but he powerless.
“Cowboys. That’s pure Americanization. They take half a everybody’s shit an sell it on the black market. All the middle-aged men been drafted. Or killed. They the link between the young and the old. These kids grow up without discipline. They’re like animals. The whole social structure fallin apart, Mista. An you know why? You know why, Mista? Nixon pushed Saigon inta passin one hundred percent mobilization an they draft every dude from eighteen to thirty-eight. And they put the seventeen and the thirty-nine ta forty-three-year-olds in the popular forces. Aint nobody left home ta mind the ville and the ville probably a refugee camp tha’s overcrowded anyway. Break my heart, Man. It break my fuckin heart.”
It was the same feeling Doc Johnson had now, that same feeling he suffered when he had a boonierat brother lying with his intestines on the ground and blood flowing from a dozen holes in his body and the valley’s socked in and he could not get a medevac. It made him sick. The frustration went very deep. It went back to his sister’s death. Poor Marlena. She could have been helped but he could not, did not, help. It came from being black, from being low class ghetto, from speaking low ghetto English. You trah, Man. You trah, trah, trah. If only I could be a doctor, a real doctor. If only I could go to school, I could be a researcher or a doctor.
Cherry could not stop shaking. His arms and back were quivering with the cold and his teeth chattered. “Maybe I’m coming down with malaria,” he whispered to himself. “Oh God, please let us get out of here.” Cherry had not been to church in over four years. He had been raised Roman Catholic, been baptized and confirmed and then he had broken away. Before coming to the boonies he had not prayed in years. Now he prayed hard. He thought of every prayer he had ever memorized as a child and he mouthed them. He said Hail Marys and The Lord’s Prayer and the Act of Contrition.
“GreenMan’s on the horn to Bravo’s niner,” Cahalan’s voice slid into the wet blackness. “They got a Dust-Off comin out.” Cahalan reported in short low bursts, listening then speaking then listening.
“Bout fuckin time,” Egan said.
“They tried earlier,” Cahalan said. “First bird got lost comin up the Song Bo. Ran low on fuel and returned.”
Random artillery had been exploding in the valley. It stopped as the helicopters approached. For a moment everything was completely silent. Then the soft thwack of rotor blades reached the valley and quickly the noise level rose. The birds either had come out without lights on or the rainmist obscured and diffused the light completely. To Alpha they were only noise.
“Little people gonna lay-n-wait fo the evac,” FO said.
“They goina want that bird,” Egan agreed.
“Oh God,” Cherry said aloud.
The sound of the rotor blades slapping the night air caused an eerie sensation. It was difficult to distinguish what had arrived. There were at least two Cobras, one very large bird, possibly a Chinook, and three, maybe four Hueys.
Bravo’s Senior RTO, Joe Escalato, was directing the birds to his location by sound. Escalate was well known to the old-timers of Alpha. He had been Lt. Brooks’ RTO when the L-T was a platoon leader with Bravo, and Escalate was a good friend of El Paso’s. “You can do it, Babe,” El Paso quietly cheered him. El Paso monitored Escalato’s net. Bravo troops popped two green star clusters, handheld flares that fired vertically a hundred feet then burst like small skyrockets.
“I’ve two lime stars.” The Dust-Off commander identified Bravo’s signal. The medical evacuation helicopter began its descent toward Bravo company. The large helicopter circling above began dropping parachute flares. Dozens of them. The burning white phosphorous splashed brightness throughout the valley and sent flat white light down through the canopy to the wet jungle floor. “I’ve my LZ marked with four reds at the corners,” Escalate informed the pilot. The flare ship circled Bravo again, dropping a second ring of flares. The lights rocked gently beneath the parachutes, descended, sputtered and went out. The flare ship renewed the lights with each pass. Alpha troops froze. “Bird’s makin a pass,” El Paso reported. “The center of my LZ is marked with a strobe,” Escalato’s voice came from the radio. “Bird’s comin in,” El Paso informed the group. With all the light from the flares it was not possible for Alpha to see Bravo. The sky glowed like the inside of a frosted light bulb.
When the medevac helicopter was still about 100 meters in the air Bravo company opened up like a mad minute, 16s, 60s, 79s, frags. They showered the jungle with suppressive fire. The intensity slowed as they reloaded. “Bird’s in,” El Paso said. Loud exploding pops from AKs intermingled with the blasting chatter of the friendly fire. “They’re loadin up,” El Paso reported. “Bird’s comin out.” The suppressive fire continued the entire time the helicopter was on the ground and as it lifted, the firing intensified. Sporadic fire came from AKs, as if the NVA were toying with Bravo, simply letting them know their mad minute was a joke. The medevac was up. The helicopters retreated from the valley. The flares sank and went out.
The night was peaceful again. Only the exploding H & I rounds disrupted the black velvet mistdrizzle. At the CP they passed the time softly discussing whatever came to mind. FO told several stories of units he had been with in the Mekong Delta on an earlier tour. El Paso jumped on an opportunity to tell Cherry about the history of Vietnam and Egan added his views of the present political situation. Doc spoke a little about the proper treatment for various wounds he suspected Bravo troops had sustained. No one mentioned Bravo’s dead FO. At one point the L-T said a few lines about the causes of war and violence and Cherry said he believed it was genetically predestined by the structure of the brain. “I want to hear more about that,” Brooks said. In their exhaustion none of them went into much detail. The GreenMan radioed Brooks and told him to speed up Alpha’s movement and get into the valley. “You gotta get in there and hurt those little people,” he said. He also congratulated Brooks on evading the NVA mortars. It was Cherry’s first CP rap session. He enjoyed it immensely. For the others it was a repeat of many previous nights. Cahalan, Brown, Doc and Minh slept. At 0455 the NVA began a full scale assault on Bravo Company.
“Oh them fuckas,” Doc said waking.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
All God’s chillun got guns.
—The Marx Brothers, Duck Soup
Here I am up in the window, that indistinguishable head you see listing toward the sun and waiting to be watered. Through a pair of strong field glasses you might be able to make out the color of my leaf (milky green), my flower (purple-white), and the poor profile of my stunted growth. In open country with stem and root room I could top four feet. Want a true botanical friend? Guess my species and you can take me home.
The view from this sill is not encouraging: colorless sky, lusterless sun, sooty field of rusted television antennas, the unharvested crop of the city; and below, down a sheer wall, the persistent dead unavoidable concrete.
This is what it means to be torn from your native soil, exiled in a clay pot five stories vertical, a mile and a half horizontal from the nearest uncemented ground. I feel old. I take light through a glass, my rain from a pipe.
Have you talked to a plant today, offered kindnesses to something green? These are crucial gestures. A plant is not free. It does not know the delirium of locomotion, the pyramidical play of consciousness, the agonies of volition. It simply stands in the dirt and grows. Vegetable bliss. But trapped indoors a plant’s pleasure becomes dependent upon human hands, clumsy irresponsible hands, hands that pinch and prune, hands that go on vacation, abandon their ferns to northern exposure, cracked beds, stale air, enervations, apathy, loneliness.
Help! My stalk is starting to droop.
Up late and into the street, that was my habit then, the night’s residue still sifting softly through my head, I’d wander down to the corner, stand shivering in the sun, waiting for the light to change and my reconnaissance to begin. I was a spook. All my papers were phony. The route was the same every afternoon, a stitching of right angles across the heart of the city where I mingled anonymously with the residents of the day world.
I was under a doctor’s care at the time, sixty minutes exercise q.d., an order I probably wouldn’t have bothered to honor had not these prescribed walks delivered me into the relief of cacophony and throng. I needed the glow of animate heat, of blood in motion, regular doses of herdlike solidity, curses, jostles, tears, life. I ogled the goodies in the big windows with the other shoppers. I rode express elevators to offices where the receptionists smiled behind bulletproof glass. I burst into violent sidewalk imprecations on the government. Nothing urban was alien to me.
At the end of the day, I’d find myself come to rest atop a public trash can. Same can, same corner, same attitude. I became a fixture of the neighborhood. There were certain faces I learned to recognize, faces I suppose recognized me, but we spoke no words, exchanged no names, in accordance with the rules of metropolitan intimacy. I sat on my can, watching the heads bob up and down the avenue like poppies in a spring meadow until the constant nodding movement turned unreal, the slow agitation of pink marine life swaying in tempo to oceanic tunes. The heart idled, breathing deepened, silver bubbles popped against my ears.
“You’re ruining the symmetry,” I announced one day to an old derelict tramping unsteadily past. He was walking the street backwards, the rear of his head advancing blindly down the block. His dress was equally distinctive: orange Day-Glo painter’s cap, field jacket fastened with safety pins, patched jeans bleached the bluish white of skim milk, purple hightop tennis shoes split at the creases.
He turned and his face was that of a young woman ready to be amused, “You’re sitting on a fucking garbage can,” she said.
“I was tired.”
She hopped up beside me. “I like it,” she said. “Gargoyles.”
I saw her fairly often after that. She’d stop by my post to share a pretzel, a carton of orange juice. “Professional interest,” she explained. “I’m a part-time social worker.” She said her name was Huette Mirandella. The rest of her history was a series of true-false propositions. Her parents had died in a hotel fire or an auto accident or a plane crash or an artful combination of the three. Orphans at ten and four, she and her younger brother were abandoned to the indifferent care of a senile great aunt. Home was boring. School was boring. Staying out late and running away were interesting and then boring. The five universities she attended were universally boring. She drifted. Minor jobs, petty boyfriends. There was an abortion, a botched suicide, a hospital vacation, “the stupid clichés of an unimaginative life,” she said. When I met her she was twenty-two years old, she studied Chinese, played electric guitar, read a science fiction novel every two days, practiced a lethal form of martial arts once a week with a garageful of women, painted vast oil abstracts she called soulographs, and speculated that if there was another Renaissance lurking about the bloody horizon of our future then she was a candidate to be its Leonardo—“the smart clichés of a pop life.”
We met on the corner for weeks and then came periods when I wouldn’t see her at all. She was home, she was at work, a soulograph required a more steely shade of blue. I continued diligently to push the leg uptown and down, in sun and snow, through needles and cramps. It seemed to change size from day to day in phase with its own moods, its own dreams. On bad days, when it dragged behind me like a sea anchor, the blocks telescoped outward, the pavement all slanted uphill, and I’d entertain notions of traveling in style. Imagine commandeering a tank, one of the big ones, forty-seven tons of M48, cast steel hull, 90 mm gun, 7.62 mm MG coaxially mounted in the turret, and running down the boulevard. Imagine the clanking, the honking horns, the cheers of the liberated masses, the flattening of each tiny car beneath the monstrous tread, the squash of automotive cockroaches. Imagine the snap, the crackle, the pop.
One bad gray afternoon I had just reached home and was rounding the turn on the first landing when, “Bang, bang,” a voice echoed harshly up. I leaned over the splintered banister. In the gloom at the bottom of the stairwell a face materialized luminous as a toy skull. I could see shining teeth and that chipped incisor that always seemed to be winking at someone over my right shoulder.
“No fair. I had my fingers crossed.”
“You’re dead,” said Huey. “You’re lying out on the front steps with the change falling out of your pockets.”
“Yeah? Where were you?”
“Sitting right on the stoop.”
“What can I say? Come pick out your prize.”
Up in my kitchen she dropped a fat brown package onto the table. Dozens of rubber bands of all colors, red, yellow, blue, green, were wound around it like shipping twine.
“That’s a mean looking bundle,” I said.
“A prize. For you.”
“Wonderful,” I said, weighing the package in my hand. “Who wrapped this, a paranoid paper boy?”
“Rafer.”
The colors of the rubber bands flipped into bright relief like thin neon tubes switched suddenly on. Rafer was her brother, executive officer of a street gang notorious for reckless drug use and dropping bricks on pedestrians from tenement rooftops. We’d once spent an amicable afternoon together, comparing scars, tattoos, chatting about the effects of various arms and pharmaceuticals.
“Three guesses,” she said, rattling open a drawer. “This the only knife you’ve got?”
I took the bayonet and began to saw. It was like cutting into a golf ball, bits of elastic flying about the room. The wrapping paper was a greasy grocery bag. Inside, pillowed upon a golden excelsior of marijuana, lay a large plastic envelope containing a small glassine envelope containing a few spoonfuls of fine white powder. Embossed in red on the large envelope was a pair of lions rampant pawing at a beachball-sized globe of the earth. Indecipherable Oriental ideograms framed the scene except beneath the cats’ feet where appeared the figure 100% and below that in English the identification DOUBLEUOGLOBE BRAND.
“What’s that?” asked Huey, peering.
“Ancient history.”
“It looks like a bag of dope.”
“Yes.”
“It looks like junk.”
I pulled open the glassine envelope, dipped a finger, and sniffed. A line from powder to nostril formed the advancing edge of a fan that spread in regal succession before inturned eyes a lacquered arrangement of glacial rock, green-toothed pine, unbroken snow, then the shimmer, the shiver, the snaking fissures, melting mountains, gray rain, animate forest, the dark, the warm, the still time of mushroom-padded places.
I was amazed. I hadn’t seen those magic lions in years. It wasn’t often you encountered an adolescent able to weld a connection into the high-voltage Oriental drug terminals.
I began rolling the unfiltered end of a Kool cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Shreds of brown tobacco sprinkled onto the white enamel table.
“What are you doing now,” asked Huey, “sleight of hand?”
I emptied out about an inch of cigarette. I poured in the powder. I tamped it down. I twisted the end shut.
“What are you laughing at?” she said.
I struck a match, touched it to the cigarette, and inhaled deeply. A dirty yellow dog ran barking into the red muddy road and beneath the tires of a two-and-a-half ton truck.
“You want any of this?” I offered in a strangled voice, leaning forward, the joint poised in midair between us. A thick strand of smoke slipped snakelike from the moist end, raised itself erect into blue air, smiled, and dissolved without a sound. In the corner the refrigerator began to hum.
This is not a settled life. A children’s breakfast cereal, Crispy Critters, provokes nausea; there is a woman’s perfume named Charlie; and the radio sound of “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” (The Animals, 1965) fills me with a melancholy as petrifying as the metal poured into casts of galloping cavalry, squinting riflemen, proud generals, statues in the park, roosts for pigeons. My left knee throbs before each thunderstorm. The sunsets are no damn good here. There are ghosts on my television set. What are we to do when the darkness comes on and we wait for something to happen, as Huey, who never even knew she shared her name with a ten-thousand-pound assault helicopter, sprawls on the floor with her sketchbook, making pastel pictures of floating cities, sleek spaceships, planets of ice, and I, your genial storyteller, wreathed in a beard of smoke, look into the light and recite strange tales from the war back in the long ago time.
A sweltering classroom in Kentucky. Seated, in long orderly rows, a terrorized company of grimy, red-faced trainees. Stage center, on an elevated podium before their fatigued eyes, a sergeant, a captain, a war.
SERGEANT: (Hands poised on hips. Booming voice.) Okay, gentlemens, listen up! This morning your commanding officer will speak on the subject of Vietnam. I’d advise you all to pay close attention to what he has to say. He’s been there, I’ve been there, we’ve all been there, and since ninety-nine point nine percent of you candy-asses now sitting in this room will also soon be there bawling and yelling for your mamas you might want to know why. So if your memory ain’t too good, take notes. And let me warn you, anyone I catch asleep will wish to Christ he was already safe and snug in a nice bronze box with the colors draped over his face. Understand? (Pause.) Ten-HUT! (The company springs up. CAPTAIN, a collapsible pointer tucked under his right arm, strides smartly to the lectern.) Take your seats! (The company falls down.)
CAPTAIN: (Low authoritative manner.) Too slow, sergeant. Have them do it again.
SERGEANT: Yessir! On your feet! (The company springs up.) Now all I want to hear is the sound of one large butt slapping against the bottom of one chair or we spend the afternoon low-crawling through the gravel parking lot. (Pause.) Taaaaake … seats! (The company falls down.) Good.
CAPTAIN: Thank you, sergeant. (He steps to stage left, extending pointer to its full length with a brisk snap.) Gentlemen, a map of Southeast Asia. This stub of land (Tap) hanging like a cock off the belly of China is the Indochinese peninsula. Here we have North Vietnam (Tap), South Vietnam (Tap), and Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand (Tap. Tap. Tap.) The Republic of Vietnam occupies the area roughly equivalent to the foreskin, from the DMZ at the seventeenth parallel down along the coast of the South China Sea to the Mekong River in the delta. Today this tiny nation suffers from a bad case of VD or, if you will, VC. (Smiles wanly.) What we are witnessing, of course, is a flagrant attempt on the part of the communist dictatorship of Hanoi to overthrow, by means of armed aggression, the democratic regime in Saigon. (Clears throat.) Now I know the majority of you could give a good goddamn about the welfare of these people or their problems; they live in a land twelve thousand miles away with habits and customs foreign to our own so you assume that their struggles are not yours. Believe me, this is a rather narrow shortsighted view. Consider the human body. What happens if an infection is allowed to go untreated? The bacteria spread, feeding on healthy tissue, until finally the individual dies. Physicians are bound by a moral oath which forbids them to ignore the presence of disease. They cannot callously turn their backs on illness and suffering and neither can we. A sore on the skin of even a single democracy threatens the health of all. Need I remind you that four presidents—I can’t emphasize this strongly enough—four presidents have recognized the danger signs and have seen fit to come to the aid of these afflicted people with massive doses of arms, troops, and economic assistance to ensure their continued independence. (Walks methodically back to lectern.) Certainly, we seek no personal gain; we’re just pumping in the penicillin, gentlemen, just pumping in the penicillin. (Long pause.) I’m sure we are all aware that this policy of limited intervention has been challenged by large segments of our own population, but just remember one thing, as far as the United States Army is concerned all debate ceased the moment you raised your right hands and took that one step forward. As men in uniform your duty is not to question policy but to carry it out as ordered. (Grips sides of lectern, leans forward menacingly.) Those are the facts regarding our present involvement in Vietnam. Are there any questions? (Short pause.) Very good. We’ve got a movie here, an excellent one as a matter of fact, produced by the State Department, which will explain the historical origins of this conflict in greater detail. And since this is probably the last time I’ll see you together as a group, I’d like to leave you with a few words of advice: keep a tight asshole, leave your pecker in your pants, and change your socks twice a day. (He winks.)
SERGEANT: Ten-HUT! (The company springs up, CAPTAIN departs down center aisle.) Take your seats! (The company falls down.)
Lights dim, film begins, images burn through the screen: bursting bombs, dying French, gleaming conference tables, scowling Dulles, golf-shirted Ike, stolid Diem shaking head, Green Berets from the sky, four stars at Kennedy’s ear, charred Buddhists, scurrying troops, Dallas, Dallas, destroyers shuddering, Marines in surf, napalm eggs, dour Johnson: let us reason, come let us reason, plunging jets, columns of smoke, beaming Mao, B-52s, UH-lAs, 105s, M-16s, Nuremberg cheers, jack-booted Fuehrer, grinning peasants, rubber-sandaled Ho, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolph Hider, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh …
Someone flipped a switch and the darkness exploded into geometry. Spheres of light overhead illuminated the angles and planes of an enormous rectangular room. Two rows of bunks faced one another in mirrored perfection and on the last bunk of the left row, a warp in the symmetry, one body, male, inert, semiconscious.
GRIFFIN, JAMES 1. 451 55 0366 SP4 P96D2T
USARV TRANS DET APO SF 96384
“Hey, numbnuts, wake up!” yelled a voice slurred with drink. “There’s a goddamn war out there.”
The lights went rapidly on and off, on and off.
Griffin’s eyes blinked once, twice, then closed in defense against the naked one-hundred-watt bulb he could feel even through shut lids bombarding him from above. Planetary-sized spots bloomed on his retina, slid back and forth, black holes in his vision. He hated being awakened like this. It was too sudden, too brutal, it was like being hit on the head from behind. It made him uneasy, subject to disturbing, revelatory thoughts. This is how you will die, said such an interruption, not in the comfortable tranquillity you have always imagined as a natural right, but violently, in shock and confusion, far from home, without preparation or kindness, rudely extinguished by an unexpected light much bigger than your own.
Then a mortar round fell out of the sky into the roof directly over his head.
In the super slow motion of television sports reports Griffin saw the underside slope of the roof shiver into a pattern of stress lines, bow, change color, and had the time to think even this: the barracks is a beer can and we’re about to be opened before his eyes and everything in them fizzed up and whooshed out into the warm foreign night. He didn’t have time to scream. The smoking rubble of morning yielded one charred finger and a handful of blackened molars
He could never decide how to finish. Real death was a phenomenon at once so sober and so silly his imagination tended to go flat attempting comprehension. Like everyone else he was able to picture possibilities. The gathered parts, the body bag, the flagged casket, grief, tears, the world going tritely on, the war too, the sky above an untarnished blue. These were generalities, accurate but lacking the satisfaction of the personal detail. Griffin believed that there existed a proper sequence of final events, which when imagined correctly would give off a click, dim the room, and shut down at last that section of his brain which worked for the other side. Meanwhile, he would learn how to handle these terrible rehearsals that rushed in on him from nowhere. Maybe they were valuable learning experiences. Maybe layers of protective hide were being sewn onto his character. Maybe when the time came he would be brave when bravery was required, calm when there was an excess of panic. He didn’t really know. Nor did he know where or when he might encounter real death, but he was sure he didn’t ever want to die in a place where in the corner two drunks argued in loud whispers over the juiciest way to fuck a gook pussy.
When you go they put you in a shed there until the computer finishes its shuffle, marked cards, shaved deck, jokers all around. Griffin remained in bed. He chose to pass.
“Got no slots for mattress testers,” they said. “We gonna place you in a right tasty location, way up north maybe, where the only lying down is of a permanent nature, heehee.”
“Do I get a pillow?” asked Griffin. Hoho.
In the bunk to his right was a randy adolescent ripe with virginal fantasies of wartime sex. He spent hours leafing through pornographic pictures reading the good parts aloud. On Griffin’s left a twenty-six-year-old baker from Buffalo, New York, who had already received his orders directed a feverish monologue to the ceiling while scratching anxiously at his groin: “I won’t go I tell you, no way, I won’t go, they’ll have to drag me out of here, those people are animals, fucking animals, they like to pull triggers, bayonet babies, I’ve seen the pictures, strings of ears on a wire, Christ! can you imagine that, what kind of person walks around wearing an ear necklace for God’s sake, who would have believed it, airborne, me airborne, why me, huh? there must be thousands of guys itching to go airborne, run around like baboons and get blown away, well I’m the winner, I’m the goddamn lucky winner. I don’t need this, I got a wife and two kids, I’ll shoot myself in the foot first, I’m not gonna get killed for a bunch of crazy glory hounds, that’s insane, know what I mean, fucking sick, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?”
Griffin pulled the sheet up over his head. He lay quite still and soon felt himself sinking into an immense bowl of vanilla pudding. It was peaceful and quiet on the bottom, submerged and fetal. From the surface the slow mournful sound of a distant radio filtered down like weary shafts of sun through an unruffled sea:
When the train left the station
It had two lights on behind.
The blue light was my blues
And the red light was my mind.
The song faded to be instantly replaced by the manic voice of a Top Forty disc jockey: “This is AFVN, the American Forces Vietnam Network broadcasting from our Tower of Power in Saigon with studios and transmitters in Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, Pleiku, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, and Quang Tri.”
My God, thought Griffin in astonishment. I really am in Vietnam.
He had been in the country for two weeks.
What can go wrong: ants
anthracnose
aphids
Botrytis
caterpillars
chlorosis
cockroaches
compacted soil
crickets
crown and stem rot cutworms
damping-off disease
earthworms
earwigs
fungus
gnats
improper lighting
improper soil pH
improper temperature
improper watering
insufficient humidity
leaf miners
leaf rollers
leaf spots
mealybugs
mildew
millipedes
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nematodes nutrient
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1. The First Clean Fact. Let’s begin with the first clean fact, James: This ain’t no war story. War stories are out—one, two, three, and a heave-ho, into the lake you go with all the other alewife scuz and foamy harbor scum. But isn’t it a pity. All those crinkly, soggy sorts of laid-by tellings crowded together as thick and pitiful as street cobbles, floating mushy bellies up, like so much moldy shag rug (dead as rusty-ass doornails and smelling so peculiar and un-Christian). Just isn’t it a pity, because here and there and yonder among the corpses are some prize-winning, leg-pulling daisies—some real pop-in-the-oven muffins, so to speak, some real softly lobbed, easy-out line drives.
But that’s the way of the world, or so the fairy tales go. The people with the purse strings and apron strings gripped in their hot and soft little hands denounce war stones—with perfect diction and practiced gestures—as a geek-monster species of evil-ugly rumor. (A geek, James, is a carnival performer whose whole act consists of biting the head off a live chicken or a snake.) These people who denounce war stories stand bolt upright and proclaim with broad and timely sweeps of the arm that war stories put other folks to sleep where they sit. (When the contrary is more to the truth, James. Any carny worth his cashbox—not dead or in jail or squirreled away in some county nuthouse—will tell you that most folks will shell out hard-earned, greenback cash, every time, to see artfully performed, urgently fascinating, grisly and gruesome carnage.)
Other people (getting witty and spry, floor-of-the-Senate, let-me-read-this-here-palaver-into-the-Congressional-Record, showboat oratorical) slip one hand under a vest flap and slide one elegantly spit-shined wing-tip shoe forward ever so clever, and swear and be damned if all that snoring at war stories doesn’t rattle windows for miles around—all the way to Pokorneyville, or so the papers claim. (Pokorneyville, James, is a real place, you understand, a little bit of a town between Wheeling and Half Day at the junction of U.S. route 12 and Aptakisic Road—a Texaco gas station, a Swedish bakery, and Don’t Drive Bed-die-Bye Motel.)
And a distinct but mouthy minority—book-learned witchcraft amateurs and half-savvy street punks and patriots-for-cash (for some piddling hand-to-mouth wage, James)—slyly hang their heads and secretly insinuate that the snoring (he-honk, he-honk, the way a good, mean, shake-shake-like-a-rag-doll snore snaps at you, James) is nothing if it isn’t the Apocalypse itself choking on its own spit, trying to catch its breath for one more go-round.
And the geeks and freaks and sideshow drifters of this world hear the dipstick yokels soaking up a shill like that, well, damned if they don’t haul off a belly laugh—haw haw haw. They know a prize-winning shuck when they hear one, James. They lean back in their folding lawn chairs, lined up in front of their setups and shacks—the Skil-Thro and Ring Toss and Guess-How-Many-Pennies-in-the-Jar-Bub? and such as that—and slap their thighs hard enough to raise welts, all the while whispering among themselves that the rubes of this world will never get the hang of things.
Now, according to some people, folks do not want to hear about Alpha Company—us grunts—busting jungle and busting cherries from Landing Zone Skator-Gator to Scat Man Do (wherever that is), humping and hauling ass all the way. We used French Colonial maps back then—the names of towns and map symbols and elevation lines crinkled and curlicued and squeezed together, as incomprehensible as the Chiricahua dialect of Apache. We never could cipher a goddamned .thing on those maps, so absolutely and precisely where Scat Man Do is tongue cannot tell, but we asked around and followed Lieutenant Stennett’s nose—flashing through some fine firefight possibilities, punji pits the size of copper mines, not to mention hog pens and chicken coops (scattering chickens and chicken feathers like so many wood chips). We made it to the fountain square in downtown Scat Man Do—and back to LZ Skator-Gator—in an afternoon, James, singing snatches of arias and duets from Simon Boccanegra and The Flying Dutchman at the top of our socks. But what we went there for no one ever told us, and none of us—what was left of us that time—ever bothered to ask.
And some people think that folks do not want to hear about the night at Fire Base Sweet Pea when the company got kicked in the mouth good and hard—street-fight hard—and wound up spitting slivers of brown teeth and bloody scabs for a fortnight. Lieutenant Stennett had us night-laagered in a lumpy, rocky slope down the way from high ground—his first (but by no stretch of your imagination his last) mistake. And you could hawk a gob of phlegm and spit into the woodline from your foxhole, James. And it was raining to beat the band. And no one was getting any sleep. And just after midnight-according to Gallagher’s radium-dial watch—some zonked-out zip crawled up sneaky-close in the mangled underbrush and whispered in the pouring rain, “Hey, you! Rich-chard Nick-zun is a egg-suckin’ hunk of runny owlshit!” And then Paco and the rest of us heard him and some other zip giggling—tee-hee-hee-hee—as though that was the world’s worst thing they could think to say, and would provoke us into rageful anger. But before any of us could wipe the rain out of our eyes, Jonesy raised his head from his rucksack, where he was taking one of his famous naps—fucking the duck, we called it—and stage-whispered right back, “Listen, you squint-eyed spook, you ain’ tellin’ me annathang ah don’ know!” Then they whispered back at us with one voice, as giggly and shivery cute as a couple smart-ass six-year-olds, “GI, you die tonight!” and then giggled some more. Paco blinked his eyes slowly, glancing out of the corners as if to say he didn’t believe he heard what he knew he heard, and shook his head, saying out loud, “What do these zips think this is, some kind of chickenshit Bruce Dern-Michael J. Pollard-John Wayne movie? ‘GI, you die tonight!’ What kind of a fucked-up attitude is that?” Then he leaned over his sopping-wet rucksack in the direction of the smirking giggles, put his hands to his mouth, megaphone-fashion, and said, “Hawkshit,” loud enough for the whole company to hear. “Put your money where your mouth is, Slopehead,” he said. “Whip it on me!” So later that night they did. They greased half the 4th platoon and Lieutenant Stennett’s brand-new radioman, and we greased so many of them it wasn’t even funny. The lieutenant got pissed off at Paco for mouthing off and getting his radioman blown away so soon—but that was okay, because the lieutenant wasn’t “wrapped too tight,” as Jonesy would say.
The next morning we got up, brushed ourselves off, cleared away the air-strike garbage—the firefight junk and jungle junk and the body bags. And the morning after that, just as right as rain, James, we saddled up our rucksacks and slugged off into the deepest, baddest part of the Goongone Forest north of our base camp at Phuc Luc, looking to kick some ass—anybody’s ass (can you dig it, James?)—and take some names. Yessiree! We hacked and humped our way from one end of that goddamned woods to the other—crisscrossing wherever our whim took us—no more sophisticated or complicated or elegant than an organized gang; looking to nail any and all of that goddamned giggling slime we came across to the barn door. Then one bright and cheery morning, when our month was up, Private First Class Elijah Raintree George Washington Carver Jones (Jonesy for short, James) had thirty-nine pairs of blackened, leathery, wrinkly ears strung on a bit of black commo wire and wrapped like a garland around that bit of turned-out brim of his steel helmet. He had snipped the ears off with a pearl-handled straight razor just as quick and slick as you’d lance a boil the size of a baseball—snicker-snack—the way he bragged his uncle could skin a poached deer. He cured the ears a couple days by tucking them under that bit of turned-out brim of his steel helmet, then toted them crammed in a spare sock. The night that Lieutenant Stennett called it quits, Jonesy sat up way after dark stringing those ears on that bit of black wire and sucking snips of C-ration beefsteak through his teeth.
And the next afternoon, when we finally humped through the south gate at Phuc Luc, you should have seen those rear-area motherfucking housecats bug their eyes and cringe every muscle in their bodies, and generally suck back against the buildings (you would have been right proud, James). Jonesy danced this way and that—shucking and jiving, juking and high-stepping, rolling his eyes and snapping his fingers in time—twirling that necklace to a fare-thee-well, shaking and jangling it (as much as a necklace of ears will jangle, James) and generally fooling with it as though it were a cheerleader’s pom-pom.
And the Phuc Luc base camp Viets couldn’t help but look, too. Now, the Viets worked the PX checkout counters (good-looking women who had to put out right smart and regular to keep their jobs), the PX barbershop (where the Viet barbers could run a thirty-five-cent haircut into $6.50 in fifteen minutes), and the stylishly thatched souvenir shack (where a bandy-legged ARVN cripple sold flimsy beer coolers and zip-a-dee-doo-dah housecat ashtrays, and athletic-style jackets that had a map embroidered on the back with the scrolled legend Hot damn—Vietnam sewn in underneath). And, James, don’t you know they were Viets during the day and zips at night; one zip we body-counted one time couldn’t booby-trap a shithouse any better than he could cut hair.
Every Viet in base camp crowded the doorways and screened windows, and such as that, gawking at Jonesy—and the rest of us, too. So he made a special show of shaking those ears at them, witch-doctor-fashion, while booming out some gibberish mumbo jumbo in his best amen-corner baritone and laughing that cool, nasty, grisly laugh of his, acting the jive fool for all those housecats. And the rest of the company—what was left of us that time—laughed at him, too, even though we humped those last three hundred meters to the tents (up an incline) on sloppy, bloody blisters, with our teeth gritted and the fraying rucksack straps squeezing permanent grooves in our shoulders. (A body never gets used to humping, James. When the word comes, you saddle your rucksack on your back, take a deep breath, and set your jaw good and tight, then lean a little forward, as though you’re walking into a stiff and blunt nor’easter, and begin by putting one foot in front of the other. After a good little while you’ve got two sharp pains as straight as a die from your shoulders to your kidneys, but there’s nothing to do for it but grit your teeth a little harder and keep humping. And swear to God, James, those last uphill three hundred meters were the sorriest, goddamnedest three hundred motherfuckers in all of Southeast Asia. Captain Courtney Culpepper, who never missed a chance to flash his West Point class ring in your face—that ring the size of a Hamilton railroad watch—never once sent the trucks to meet us at the gate: said we had humped that far, might as well hump the rest.)
Nor do people think that folks want to hear what a stone bore (and we do mean stone, James) sitting bunker guard could be. Now some troopers called it perimeter guard and some called it berm guard, but it was all the same. The bunkers, James: broad, sloping sandbagged affairs the size of a forty-acre farm on the outside and a one-rack clothes closet inside, lined up every forty meters or so along the perimeter, within easy grenade range of the concertina wire and the marsh. You sit scrunched up, bent-backed, and stoop-shouldered on a plain pine plank, staring through a gun slit the size of a mail slot. And you stare at a couple hundred meters of shitty-ass marsh that no zip in his right mind would try to cross, terraced rice paddy long gone to seed, and a raggedy-assed, beat-to-shit woodline yonder. (That wood-line was all fucked up, James, because we used to shoot it up every now and again out of sheer fucking boredom.) Well, you stare at all that, and stare at it, until the moonlit, starlit image of weeds and reeds and bamboo saplings and bubbling marsh slime burns itself into the back of your head in the manner of Daguerre’s first go with a camera obscura. You peep through that skinny-ass embrasure with your M-16 on full rock and roll, a double armful of fragmentation grenades—frags, we called them—hanging above your head on a double arm’s length of tripflare wire, and every hour at the quarter hour you crank up the land-line handphone and call in a situation report—sit-rep, we called it—to the main bunker up the hill in back of you fifty paces or so. “Hell-o? Hell-o, Main Bunker!” you say, extra-friendly-like. “Yez,” comes this sleepy, scrawny voice, mellowed by forty meters of land-line commo wire. “This here is Bunker Number 7,” you say, and snatch one more glance downrange—everything bone-numb evil and cathedral-quiet. “Everything is okeydokey. Hunky-dory. In-the-pink and couldn’t-be-sweeter!” And that sleepy, scrawny voice takes a good long pause, and takes a breath, and drawls right back at you, “Well, okay, cuz!”
And between those calls up the hill—and taking a break every now and again to take a whiz, downrange—you have nothing better to do than stare at that marsh and twiddle your thumbs, and give the old pecker a few tugs for the practice, wet-dreaming about that Eurasian broad with the luscious, exquisite titties who toured with a Filipino trio and turned tricks for anyone of commissioned rank.
Those Filipinos, James, they were extra-ordinary. One guy played a rickety Hawaiian guitar, one guy played a banged-up tenor saxophone, and the third guy played the electric accordion—and that dude could squeeze some fine accordion, James. That trio and the woman played every nickel-and-dime base camp, every falling-down mess hall and sleazy, scruffy Enlisted Men’s Club south of the 17th Parallel (the DMZ, we called it)—as famous in their own way as Washing Machine Charlie, the legendary night rider of Guadalcanal. So how come they never made the papers, you may ask.
Well, James, reporters, as a gang, acted as though our whole purpose for being there was to entertain them. They’d look at you from under the snappily canted brim of an Abercrombie & Fitch Australian bush hat as much as to say, “Come on, kid, astonish me! Say something fucked up and quotable, something evil, something bloody and nasty, and be quick about it—I ain’t got all day; I’m on a deadline.” But mostly you’d see them with one foot on the lead-pipe rail and one elbow on the stained plywood bar of the Mark Twain Lounge of the Hyatt-Regency Saigon, swilling ice-cold raspberry daiquiris and vodka sours by the pitcherful—pussy drinks, bartenders called them. The younger, “hipper” ones popped opium on the sly or sprinkled it on their jays, and chewed speed like Aspergum, but their rap was the same, “Don’t these ignorant fucking grunts die ugly! It’s goddamned bee-utiful!” They’d lean sideways against the bar, drugstore-cowboy-style—twiddling their swizzle sticks—and stare down at their rugged-looking L. L. Bean hiking boots or Adidas triple-strip deluxe gym shoes, swapping bullshit lies and up-country war stories. “Say, Jack,” would say this dried-up, milky-eyed old sports hack from the Pokorneyville Weekly Volunteer-Register, “I seen this goofy, wiggyeyed, light-skinned spade up at Fire Base Gee-Gaw las’ week. Had some weird shit scrawled on the back of his flak jacket, Jack: ‘Rule 1. Take no shit. Rule 2. Cut no slack. Rule 3. Kill all prisoners.’ I ast him if he was octoroon—he looked octoroon to me—and he says (can you beat this?), ‘I ain’t octoroon, I’m from Philly!’ Haw-shit, buddy-boy, some of these nigras is awful D-U-M-B.” Then slush-eyes’ll take another couple he-man slugs of raspberry daiquiri, smacking his lips and grinning to high heaven.
So, James, listening to conversation like that, how can anyone expect reporters and journalists—and that kind—would appreciate anything as subtle and arcane and pitiful as one three-piece USO band and the snazziest, hot-to-trot honey-fuck to hit the mainland since the first French settlers. Those guys can’t be everywhere, now, can they?
Those Filipinos ha-wonked and razza-razzed and pee-winged, sharping and flatting right along for close to three hours down at the lighted end of our company mess hall. The whole charm of their music was the fact that they couldn’t hit the same note at the same time at the same pitch if you passed a hat, plunked the money down, put a .45 to their heads, and said, “There! Now, damnit, play!” They played the “Orange Blossom Special” and “Home on the Range” and “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog” and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” after a fashion. And they played songs like “Good Night, Irene” and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” and “I Love You a Bushel and a Peck”—music nobody ever heard of but the gray-headed lifers. And that woman, who hardly had a stitch on (and she was one fluffy dish, James), wiggled pretty little titties right in the colonel’s mustache—Colonel Hubbel having himself a front-row kitchen chair—and she sure did sit him up straight, all right And the rest of the battalion officers and hangers-on (artillery chaplains and brigade headquarters busybodies on the slum) sat shoulder patch to shoulder patch in a squared-off semicircle just as parade-ground pretty as you please. They crossed their legs to hide their hard-ons, and tried to look as blasé and matter-of-fact—as officer-like and gentlemanly—as was possible, trying to keep us huns away from the honey. And the rest of the company, us grunts, stood close-packed on the floor and the chairs and tables, and hung, one-armed, from the rafters—our tongues hanging out, swilling beer from the meat locker and circle-jerking our brains out. Our forearms just a-flying, James; our forearms just a blur. And that broad shimmied and pranced around near-naked, jiggling her sweaty little titties like someone juggling two one-pound lumps of greasy, shining hamburger, and dry-humping the air with sure and steady rhythmic thrusts of her nifty little snatch—ta-tada-ha-humpa, ta-tada-ha-humpa, ta-tada-ha-humpa, ha-whoo! Then a couple black guys from the 3rd platoon’s ambush began to clap their hands in time and shout, “Come awn, Sweet Pea, twiddle those goddamn thangs in my mustache! Come awn, Coozie, why don’t ya’ll sit awn my face—yaw haw haw.”
(Let’s tell it true, James, do you expect you’ll ever see that scene in a movie?)
But most particularly, people think that folks do not want to hear about the night at Fire Base Harriette—down the way from LZ Skator-Gator, and within earshot of a ragtag bunch of mud-and-thatch hooches everyone called Gookville—when the whole company, except for one guy, got killed. Fucked-up dead, James; scarfed up. Everybody but Paco got nominated and voted into the Hall of Fame in one fell swoop. The company was night-laagered in a tight-assed perimeter up past our eyeballs in a no-shit firefight with a battalion of headhunter NVA—corpses and cartridge brass and oily magazines and dud frags scattered around, and everyone running low on ammo. Lieutenant Stennett crouched over his radio hoarsely screaming map coordinates to every piece of artillery, every air strike and gunship within radio range, like it was going out of style, when all of a sudden—zoom—the air came alive and crawled and yammered and whizzed and hummed with the roar and buzz of a thousand incoming rounds. It was hard to see for all the gunpowder smoke and dust kicked up by all the muzzle flashes, but everyone looked up—GIs and zips—and knew it was every incoming round left in Creation, a wild and bloody shitstorm, a ball-busting cataclysm. We knew that the dirt under our bellies (and the woods and the villes and us with it) was going to be pulverized to ash (and we do mean pulverized, James), so you could draw a thatch rake through it and not find the chunks; knew by the overwhelming, ear-piercing whine we swore was splitting our heads wide open that those rounds were the size of houses. We don’t know what the rest of the company did, or the zips for that matter, but the 2nd squad of the 2nd platoon swapped that peculiar look around that travels from victim to victim in any disaster. We ciphered it out right then and there that we couldn’t dig a hole deep enough, fast enough; couldn’t crawl under something thick enough; couldn’t drop our rifles, and whatnot, and turn tail and beat feet far enough but that this incoming wouldn’t catch us by the scruff of the shirt, so to speak, and lay us lengthwise. We looked around at one another as much as to say, “Oh fuck! My man, this ain’t your average, ordinary, everyday, garden-variety sort of incoming. This one’s going to blow everybody down.” Swear to God, James, there are those days—no matter how hard you hump and scrap and scratch—when there is simply nothing left to do but pucker and submit. Paco slipped off his bandanna and sprinkled the last of his canteen water on it, wiped his face and hands, then twirled it up again and tied it around his neck—the knot to one side. Jonesy laid himself out, with his head on his rucksack, getting ready to take another one of his famous naps. Most of the rest of us simply sat back and ran our fingers through our hair to make ourselves as presentable as possible. And Gallagher, who had a red-and-black tattoo of a dragon on his forearm from his wrist to his elbow, buttoned his shirt sleeves and brushed himself off, and sat cross-legged, with his hands folded meditatively on his lap. In another instant everyone within earshot was quiet, and a hush of anticipation rippled through the crowd, like a big wind that strikes many trees all at once. Then we heard the air rushing ahead of those rounds the same as a breeze through a cave—so sharp and cool on the face, refreshing and foul all at once—as though those rounds were floating down to us as limp and leisurely as cottonwood leaves. We looked one another up and down one more time, as much as to say, “Been nice. See you around. Fucking shit! Here it comes.”
And in less than it takes to tell it, James, we screamed loud and nasty, and everything was transformed into Crispy Critters for half a dozen clicks in any direction you would have cared to point; everything smelled of ash and marrow and spontaneous combustion; everything—dog tags, slivers of meat, letters from home, scraps of sandbags and rucksacks and MPC scrip, jungle shit and human shit—everything hanging out of the woodline looking like so much rust-colored puke.
Yes, sir, James, we screamed our gonads slam-up, squeeze-up against our diaphragms, screamed volumes of unprintable oaths. When the motherfuckers hit we didn’t go poof of a piece; rather, we disappeared like sand dunes in a stiff and steady offshore ocean breeze—one goddamned grain at a time. We disappeared the same as if someone had dropped a spot of dirt into a tall, clear glass of water-bits of mud trailed behind that spot until it finally dissolved and nothing reached bottom but a swirling film. (Not that it didn’t smart, James. Oh, it tickled right smart. First it thumped ever so softly on the top of our heads—your fat-assed uncle patting you on your hat, leaning way back and bragging his fool head off about how proud he is of the way you do your chores. But then came the bone-crushing, ball-busting rush—the senior class’s butter-headed peckerwood flashing around the locker room, snapping the trademark corner of a sopping-wet shower towel upside everyone’s head with a mighty crack. Whack!)
Whooie! We reared back and let her rip so loud and vicious that all the brothers and sisters at Parson Doo-dah’s Meeting House Revival fled—we mean split, James; we mean they peeled the varnish off the double front doors in their haste. The good parson was stalking back and forth in front of the pulpit rail, shouting and getting happy, slapping his big meaty hands together, signifying those sinners—bimbam-boom—and calling on the mercy of Sweet Jesus. Well, sir, our screams hit the roofing tin like the dictionary definition of a hailstorm and swooped down the coal-stove chimney—“Ah-shool” Those sinners jumped back a row or two as though Brother Doo-dah had thrown something scalding in their faces. They threw up their arms, wiggled and wagged their fingers, shouting to high heaven, “Allelujah!” “A-men!” “Yes, Lord!” “Save me, Jesus!” Then they grabbed their dog-eared Bibles and hand-crocheted heirloom shawls, and hit the bricks. Yes, sir, James, plenty of the good brothers and sisters got right and righteous that night. And Brother Doo-dah was left standing in the settling dust slowly scratching his bald, shining head, pondering—wondering—just exactly how did he do that marvelous thing?
Oh, we dissolved all right, everybody but Paco, but our screams burst through the ozone; burst through the rags and tatters and café-curtain-looking aurora borealis, and so forth and suchlike; clean as a whistle; clean as a new car—un-fucked-with and frequency-perfect out into God’s Everlasting Cosmos. Out where it’s hot enough to shrivel your eyeballs to the shape and color and consistency of raisins; out where it’s cold enough to freeze your breath to resemble slab plastic.
And we’re pushing up daisies for half a handful of millennia (we’re all pushing up daisies, James), until we’re powder finer than talc, finer than fine, as smooth and hollow as an old salt lick—but that bloodcurdling scream is rattling all over God’s ever-loving Creation like a BB in a boxcar, only louder.