Dear Asshole,
Weather is here, wish you were beautiful.
How are things in the Ivy League? You thought I’d forgotten you, didn’t you, sweetheart? Well, it’s me. Up to my hips in elephant grass and flies like B-52s.
Let me tell you a story. Last week I was assigned to your basic listening-post operation, with half a dozen other bastards, all of us loaded for bear but hoping we don’t find any. The idea behind this kind of operation is simple: hang around with your mouth shut, your radio turned on, just listening. Find out what kind of crap is going down up there, the captain told us. Captain Francis Fogg. That’s not made up. Captain Francis Fucking Fogg.
So Fogg sent us over the river and through the woods. At twilight, I gotta say, it was something to behold, that river. Like pure red blood. It had been lousy to wade, but amazing to look at. Even Black Jimbo Samuels, who is no orator, made a little speech. “Ain’t seen no scenery like this before, not nowhere,” he said. “It kind of make you forget about the war.” Mickey Donato shook his head. “I’m gonna write for a fucking brochure,” he said.
We went into the woods to make ourselves invisible. Camouflage, head to toe, with all kinds of black shit on our faces and hands. (“I don’t need that shit on my face,” Black Jimbo said. “Just don’t smile,” said Waller. He also said, “I don’t want to see nobody waving. I don’t want to hear nobody farting. We are the woods, man. We are bamboo-brained, with hearts of palm.” I liked that a lot. Bamboo-brained, with hearts of palm, and I told him he got an A from me, the professor.
After a while, we came to a place where the trail turned into a big woods, with a canopy of trees, and tiny flowers in the bush below. The area smelled mossy and damp. The usual jungle racket seemed to subside here, get absorbed into the tangle. And it was getting dark fast. That’s when Waller said to spread out along the trail somewhere, go as far as you want to, and spend the night. All by yourself in the dark. No mommy or daddy, he said. No night lights but the fucking moon and stars. If you can see them, and rots of ruck. (Waller’s eloquence was not something you could rely on.)
So I said to myself, given the usual level of noise and the fact that you spend most of your time in close quarters with guys who in real life you wouldn’t probably give the time of day, I decided to go a long way out. Walk to fucking Laos.
After maybe three hours, I found a cool spot under a humongous tree of some kind—I don’t know one tree from the next out here—then I zoomed into a kind of trance. Was too excited to sleep: the jungle is like caffeine, the way it turns up the volume in your head. But I got a good trance going, and I began to think about home. About returning a goddamn hero or something like that. I go to visit the old high school—walk in like a big shot. Look at me now, I say to them. But then I realize that Time has bit a chunk out of everybody’s ass. Those still hanging on look like shit—Mr. Donatello, Miss Lupinksi, Mrs. Rider. They have forgot my name. The principal doesn’t know me from squat. So there was never any point in going back. In trying to prove anything. Never any fucking point.
Maybe I learned something here, something like Dad learned in Salerno but kept pretty quiet about all these years, though he once said to me that everything changed for him after Salerno. He said it was the central fact of his life, more important than everything before and most things after. This was like the last thing he said to me that night before I left for boot camp—like some kind of secret between us. I asked him to explain what he meant, and he said, “You’ll get it, I know that.”
And you know what? He was right. I’ve come to a place inside myself here, a quiet place, that only gets clearer and quieter as it gets messier and noisier around me. Do you follow me, Bro???
In any case, I’m just lying there, having Deep Thoughts, such as those just transmitted, when the parade begins. I mean, The Parade! First I hear a few voices, and I want to shit my pants. Then I realize it’s not just a few folks walking by in black pajamas, but the whole goddamn army of North Vietnam. The Commie Party of the Entire World. I mean, I must have fallen asleep beside the Ho Chi Minh Trail or something because I never saw so many soldiers—old men, medics, maniacs, gooks and geeks galore. I mean one after the fucking other, hoof and mouth, the whole fandango. And everybody’s got a Russian automatic or some Chink weapon that could do serious damage if they pointed it your way and pulled the trigger. In the dark—and it was so damn dark—they might have been carrying sticks. Maybe I had fallen into a time warp, I thought, and this was the army of Genghis Khan?
If I’d sneezed or coughed, they’d have gunned me down on the spot. Or cut my dick off. Who knows? They seemed both scary and pathetic at the same time. Just a bunch of guys trudging through the jungle at night, going nowhere at a slow pace, following the leader like a bunch of ants, filing along the trail.
I must have fallen asleep, I don’t know. The trudging had got to me—all those geeks like a long insect with a million feet. I didn’t know if I’d ever get back to Waller, Mickey, Eddie Sloane and Fink O’Malley and Black Jimbo. But I figured those guys were dealing with the same shit, too. They were squatting in trees or bushes, watching the big parade that came out of nowhere. Or maybe the whole shabang was some kind of dream? I’d smoked some amazing shit that day. Hanoi Hash. I wondered if I was seeing the Army of North Vietnam or just having my worst trip ever.
In the moonlight, everybody looked like a ghost. The black pajamas disappeared, and it was loose, ghostly heads bobbing in the air, not smiling, not talking. Just walking. The whole world on foot. Old men and young men, middle-age men, even some women. I saw every shape and form in front of me, and I thought I recognized a few. I’d seen them before, back in Pittston. On the streets in Wilkes-Barre. Seen them on the Little League field and in the Catholic Youth Center in Scranton.
Maybe it was just the worst fucking dream I’d ever had? Anyway, by morning they were gone. The trail was empty, and sunlight sparkled on the cobwebs in the brush, and drops of dew glistened. Poetic, huh? I sipped at my canteen, ate some rations—the chocolate first—and waited. I didn’t want any nasty surprises. And when I finally headed back, retracing my steps through the jungle, I walked more carefully than before. Waller said he didn’t think the area was mined, but what did he know? He’d also said we were alone out there. So I stepped careful onto the path, trying to avoid Toe Poppers and Bouncing Bettys. Followed the same path that the population of North Vietnam had followed, the whole goddamn country, the night before. It was kind of easy, getting in line behind the rest. Maybe it was their turn, in broad daylight, to take to the bushes, and to watch me.
I found the guys under a banyan tree or some fucking thing with big ugly leaves and gummy roots that stank like a hog’s breath. O’Malley and Donato were playing cards and whispering, since this was a listening post. Like in church or something. Waller was writing a letter to his wife, Susie. We all knew about Susie. Black Jimbo was picking his toenails. I didn’t see Eddie Sloane or anybody else.
“I’m glad you guys are okay,” I said.
They looked up like I was nuts. And when I mentioned the parade, they looked skeptical. Donato said, “I didn’t see nothing.” Waller shook his head, with a shit-eating grin. No, said Fink, there was nothing down here. You probably ate something bad, and it was working its charms. Maybe you smoked too much. Nobody had seen a goddamn thing, and I wasn’t going to argue about it. I mean, who am I to insist?
Vision is like that, right? I mean, you see something, and it’s fucking fantastic—scary, beautiful, damned, whatever—and you don’t dare tell anybody else about it. You keep it to yourself because that’s where it lives best. Down and fresh, the dearest thing you know.
But here I am I’m telling you, asshole. So keep it to yourself.
Socrates