At the beginning of his second month in Vietnam, Nicky was shipped out of Saigon. “I don’t want some patsy-ass assignment,” he wrote. He wanted to get “out there, where it’s happening, whatever it is. Like Saturday night back in Pittston. If you weren’t out, you were a dickhead, a wussy who got no pussy. Like you, Alex. Always home on the weekends, your nose in a goddamn book, dick in hand.”
Dear Asshole,
I went and did it, yesterday. Not a month up here, and—you guessed it—I fucking killed a guy. Some poor bastard, and I didn’t even mean to waste him. Was just sitting in a tree, minding my own business on the trail, thinking about nothing but pussy. Only half a mile from camp—playing lookout like we did as kids. We do it here all the time, taking turns on the trail near camp, keeping an eye open for the goddamn enemy. You just sit in a tree, M-16 on your lap. In daylight, you can read a book if you got a book you want to read. Or sit there and think about things. Or don’t think about things.
You ever notice how, in the middle of some goddamn mess, everything seems so quiet? There is life, crumbling under your feet, and it’s all smiles and kissy-kissy. Suddenly, wham. Reality sticks a finger in your eye. It’s all over you, and over before you know what hit.
So there I was, sitting like a tree frog happy as shit, and this Commie walks out of nowhere. Black pajamas, sandals, Soviet weapons, the works, but all by his lonesome. Like he stumbled out of bed in the middle of the day, going down to take a piss in his pj’s. A skinny little guy, walking along in a daze, kind of lost. I figured back in his village he was probably nothing special. A bike mechanic, maybe. The sort of guy who would bag groceries in Skettino’s or pump gas at the Chevron. But what do I know? All I really know is I caught him top down. Put a hole in the back of his head that took away the whole fucking front part, ripped it right off, the face mask. Caught him again between the shoulder blades as he fell.
Half a dozen guys came running. Our guys, not their guys. We never found anybody else from their team in the vicinity. (He must have been on some private expedition, looking for butterflies. This place has these big white butterflies—like snowflakes in hell.) My team, they were ready to mow, man. I mean, Micky Donato’s a big guy, and he came running ahead of everyone, spraying bullets from an M-60, his goddamn machine gun. Eddie was behind him, Eddie Sloane, the Iowa guy, my cornpone half-Injun friend, with his medical kit and a .45 caliber pistol, waving it overhead like the Lone Ranger and Tonto in one uniform. Then comes Jimbo Samuels, Black Jimbo, a skinny black kid from the Bronx, lugging his stoner, one of the those big motherfucker guns, and Fink O’Malley and Buzz Baxter. They were big-eyed, scared, excited as shit. Fink especially.
I don’t know how he got to be called Fink, but it’s how he introduced himself. O’Malley is from Boston, and he keeps a Red Sox pennant rolled up in his knapsack, for luck. A mixed-up bastard if I ever saw one, a walking medicine chest, with dope and tranquilizers, uppers and downers, inners and outers. He’s got creams, too: for jock itch and toe rot, for blisters and boils. American skin wasn’t made for jungles. Buzz is, well, another story. A bear of very little brain. Doesn’t say peep to nobody, but he likes comic books—Spider-Man, Batman, Superman. One day he’s gonna fly away, they say. Surprise everybody and fly away from this fucked-up shithole of a country.
Yes, they all agreed, the motherfucker was dead. Fucking eliminated. So we dug a hole and shoved him into it. It was too close to camp to just let the shredded wheat rot on the trail, which is usually what happens here. I mean, you don’t go around packaging the goods, burying them. And they don’t come with choppers and body bags and flags and shit, like we do. We pick off ten guys, they say, for every one of us they get. Which is good arithmetic, unless you’re on the short end of the equation, which I don’t intend to be.
You can only get so much from scenery, but I got to say, the scenery here is something else, especially in the highlands. I was telling Eddie it’s like the Poconos only with palm trees and kamikaze mosquitoes. Vines and bamboos, all that Tarzan shit. I was thinking of Tarzan when that poor bastard in the black pj’s walked under my perch and got himself blasted on the old bean.
Fink said, Jeezus Christ, you shredded the poor fucker. They couldn’t even sell him for body parts—unless all you wanted was the odd toe or finger. It was real weird to look at him, the way his face was pretty much pulped. You hit a guy from above like that, with several good shots, and it takes away most of the cheekbones, the nose, even the upper lip. The skull was like a jack-o’-lantern, only more fucked up. Bigger and blacker holes. Jeezus is right, I said. You nailed that one, Finko.
Nam is one nightmare hunting trip. No wonder I keep remembering those trips in the Poconos, with you and me and Dad, with Sam Barzini and Joey the Jock and Little Nino with the fat lip. Just last night I was telling Eddie about when you got your first deer, and how you didn’t want to look at it. Dad got moral and macho, and he said that if you’re gonna kill something, you gotta take responsibility. Spoken like an hombre. But then you started to cry, and he felt like a piece of shit and gave you my fucking chocolate bar. Mine! The nice part was when we got home nobody said a thing to Mom, and there was this amazing thing we suddenly had in common.
One of the few good things I can say for this adventure is that we’re doing something together, me and Eddie and Mickey, Jim, Fink, Buzz. A good thing or bad thing, it doesn’t matter. It’s a team effort, and that brings a good feeling.
But that bastard I shot. What do I do about him? Do I take some responsibility here? Weren’t no fucking deer, Eddie Sloane said. But you should have seen the guy, so messed up you couldn’t take your eyes off him. While we were digging a pit the bastard got covered in ants like a piece of candy in summer on our sidewalk, but worse. I mean swarming. We tossed the fucker in the hole, covered him over, not very deep—just enough to keep the smell away and to satisfy ourselves that we’d done the right thing. Planted him, maybe a couple of feet under. It probably wasn’t necessary, Mickey Donato said. You let anything just lay there by itself, uncovered, and it’s history in maybe a day or two. The rotting time is fast-forward in the jungle.
Last night, I got thinking about being nowhere. Dying ain’t so bad, I figured. We’re all atoms, huh? Death is just a rearrangement of matter. It’s just another way of putting the same old thing. And it probably doesn’t hurt, not after the first couple of seconds, if you’re lucky.
I don’t know yet how bad it’s going to be down the next few months or how often I’ll get time to write. Lots of S & D coming up, which means you walk around in the bush with your dick out, looking for trouble. Really ingenious. You’d think somebody in Washington or Saigon would say, Hey, why don’t we get ourselves a strategy? But there’s no hope for that. It’s not like any thought went into this war.
The thing is, I don’t feel like a soldier yet, even though I killed this guy. I don’t feel anything, which is creepy. I was sorry for the bastard, of course. He’s got a past, a family, a neighborhood that knew his habits. There was a picture in his pocket, but I couldn’t tell what it was or who. Boy or girl. Lover, friend, mother. I put it back where it came from, figuring I’d done enough to disturb his course through this particular universe.
Jeezus, there was something beautiful about that kid, with shiny black hair that fit him like a helmet, and his beardless chin. Not a hair on his goddamn chest—at least where it wasn’t blown away. Like maybe I killed a kid, I said. Lieutenant Jack Waller, a prick under most circumstances, with a loose belly and a bald head, he said, Hey, it’s war, so what did you expect, a fucking tea party? It’s war, all right, I answered, but a kid’s a fucking kid. He’s got a mother, a history. Waller just shook his head. You must be Catholic, he said.
I hate to admit this, but I started crying. Weird, huh? I never cried back home, not once that I can remember. But Eddie took my arm, and he said, Sit. Sit your ass down. Here, have a drink. He had Jack Daniels—one of those miniature bottles you get on airlines that somebody must have slipped him. So I drank it. He said, Don’t take it so hard, there’s a lot more where this came from. A shitload more.
He meant death, of course. Not whiskey.
Maybe you’ve heard enough for one letter, Asshole. Sorry for the ramble. I hope it’s okay to spill all this shit. From your letters, I can tell you’re curious as a dog around a pile of new shit, so I don’t feel guilty rambling on like I do, passing time. Write me again, and soon.
From Nam, with kisses,
Nicky