WHEN YOU FIRST CAME INTO THE country, it was on a Buffalo, a huge, silver-winged transport flashing through the clouds at three hundred knots. This was your commute, the way some people ride the train to work. You stood up in the cockpit, in baggy pants and a T-shirt, watching the earth glide beneath your feet. A flat, spectral wasteland, cyclones of red dust writhing up in some slow-motion manifestation of—what? the devil? Whatever it was down there, it was the opposite of Richmond, Virginia. It was the opposite of home sweet home. Your hands were shaking, just a little, but still—shaking.
Somewhere at twenty-nine thousand feet, near the fourth cataract of the Nile, near the spot where it was prophesied by a great chief that a wondrous bird would one day bring food to the starving Dinka, they asked you your name. South African pilots—big, burly yahoos with seven tons of maize in the cargo hold, Coca-Colas pressed between their knees, and a couple of porn mags thrown around the cockpit, but good guys—asked you your name. So lost in your head, you couldn’t speak. Move lips, make sound: Ja-son. Yeah, Jason. Jason Mat-us. American. They smiled at that. Like: This fish is gonna get eaten alive.
Then the earth got bigger. Green spots became tamarind trees; brown dots became tukels, thatched huts scattered in groups of three and four—some of them burned out, some bombed, some lopsided and listing. Purple forms blurred through the bush.
Now the Buffalo hit the ground, bouncing down a potholed dirt track. You went back into the long, dark cave of the cargo hold, moving on automatic, and suddenly the hatch was thrown open. What hit you was roaring and mean, beams of bright light and a 120-degree blowtorch of heat that incinerated your breath just as it was leaving your lungs, so it seemed to come out of you like fire. What hit you was the smell of Africa, the dust and sweat and burned urine and sun-scorched blades of elephant grass.
Everyone took a step back when you jumped down, as if you were an alien, dust rising when your booted feet hit the earth near their naked ones, your body inadvertently hunched in ready position as if you were back at school on the wrestling mat. And then there was that weird microsecond when your eyes rose up, your head craned skyward. To these men who just kept growing! You looked up at them, these men. And they looked down at you. And you looked up at them. And they at you again.
Until a hand came through the air. Big peace, a voice said in another tongue. Big peace, said Jason Matus without hesitation, putting a hand back through the air. And the hands met there—one the blackest of black, one the whitest of pale white. Like shaking hands with midnight; like shaking hands with goat’s milk. And the man held on to you, Jason Matus, and led you away from the plane, into his world now, and the crowd parted, these amazing faces, hollowed with high cheekbones, super-white eyeballs and teeth, foreheads scarred with tribal markings, bodies clean of hair. You didn’t even notice their ribs at first, the ballooned bellies and the bloated hands. At first, you didn’t notice what the Dinka simply call the Hunger, though that’s what you had come for. Just saw their faces, made sure you met their smiles and gazes. And then all those hands reaching for you. Men in sky-blue djellaba gowns fluttering from their stick-thin bodies like loose sails. Mali madit. Big peace, my brother.
Suddenly everything you once knew—well, it didn’t matter here in southern Sudan. You were walking into one of the all-time great fucked-up situations on this earth. Famine. Drought. Genocide. For most of the last fifty years, a civil war had been raging between the Muslim government in Khartoum and its militias and then the Christian tribes and Ph.D. rebel leaders of the south, all chasing one another around with AK-47s, trying to blow one another’s heads off. And millions of innocents running, too, fleeing from rape and slave raids and murder, escaping with nothing but their own skin and bones, set loose across the whole wide expanse of barren flatland like crippled giraffes. Hundreds of thousands dying from the Hunger.
The victims—but they were smiling when you jumped out of that Buffalo. Each hand you touched—it was as if you were being pulled from a fast current of water. So who was strong and who was weak here? Who needed help, anyway? You were young, though not altogether innocent. Tough, but one hour in this sun and you were lobster red. You’d backpacked for nearly three years. Out there in the world—eating at roadside stands in India and bazaars in Morocco, surfing in Sri Lanka, drinking the bad water, going native, wearing sarongs and hippie beads and dreadlocks. Yes, it was a phase, but wonderful how no one cared who your daddy was or where you’d gone to school. No, you started with only two things out there. Name and nationality. Jason Matus, American.
You were on a secret journey, a pilgrimage to find your true self by abandoning the comforts of home, by throwing over who you were supposed to be. When you were sick—amoebic dysentery, malaria—you lay in bed in faraway youth hostels, fasting, dizzy with fever, listening to the ocean and the voices in Arabic or Hindi or some language you’d never heard before drifting up to your window. When you were in Nepal, you trekked into the Himalayas without knowing where you were going, searching for epiphany, and then almost froze in your epiphany at eighteen thousand feet. When you read a book about the medicinal benefits of drinking your own urine, you drank your pee every day for eight months because—well, you sound like a madman now—because you thought it would make you whole, make you strong, give you back some essence of yourself that you’d somehow squandered for so many years.
But what were you looking for out there in the world, anyway? What did you want? One thing: to match your words with your deeds. That was it: Marry the thought, the word, and the action. Make it one single reflex based on good intention. In this big world of hurt, you thought you could make a difference. Be one pure, unalloyed thing. A place of refuge. Shelter. Like, Give me your tired and poor and huddled masses. Give them to me, man.
So here you go, hombre. Welcome to the Sudan, to civil war, to these naked kids crawling in the dirt at your feet, covered in flies, too spent to swat them away. Welcome to sleeping beneath trees, the ground so hot at midnight your T-shirt is soaked, then waking to twenty hovering faces, more Dinka kids touching your hair. And here’s to shitting in shallow holes, no running water, and never-ending days in the brutal sun. Here’s to wondering if that distant thunder happens to be bombs from government Antonovs or if those nightly gunshots—what you will come to call “a little night music”—mean it’s time to get up and run.
No, this wasn’t some Sally Struthers late-night commercial, this was the real thing. This was one rebel group killing people at a food drop and spilling their blood over sacks of sorghum. This was coworkers getting shot and killed, land-mined and kidnapped. This was guinea worm and Ebola and sleeping sickness and about five other nameless diseases that could liquidate you instantly. And this finally was eight, nine, ten thousand dying people at an airdrop, standing right smack on the big white X, and you, Jason Matus, trying to clear them before the cargo plane appeared, before it released fifteen tons of maize or high-energy biscuits from eight hundred feet, just slid it down rollers on pallets and let it waterfall out the back hatch of the plane. The Dinka—and other tribes in the south, the Nuer and Luo—seemed only to half understand the danger of getting pancaked by a pallet loaded with 110-pound bags of maize. They held their hands out, mimicking a bird, smiling at you. Didn’t they understand that one mishandled toggle would send fifteen tons down on their heads? That thought drove you through the crowd like a lunatic, shoving and yelling and then looking up at the sky for some sign of the plane. Jetki rot! Move! Get back! Did you hear me? Pick up and get back!
And then later, soaked with sweat, taking refuge in the shade of a tamarind tree, you watched the glory of that first food drop, helped command it with the radio in your hand. “Whiskey Whiskey to UN Foxtrot 12, clear to drop.” A powerful thing, to see that dolphin-nosed aircraft marked WFP—World Food Programme—appearing out of nowhere, roaring from Kenya across the great nothingness of southern Sudan. Like the cavalry riding in. Its contrail like an umbilical cord. The hatch lowering and then the food—just awesome the way it poured out into all that light and space and sky, like the loaves and the fishes. Beautiful, the way the sacks speckled the air, each one full of good Kansas corn, and hit the ground with a thud and then, as if they were full of living bodies, turned somersaults. On this afternoon, there seemed to be nothing but big peace and three hundred somersaulting sacks of maize!
Still, you knew nothing yet. You came across that field, a magic man with hairy arms who’d perhaps conjured a big bird to feed the Dinka. Yes, for a few of them, you were the prophet fulfilling the prophecy. When the porters had removed nearly all the food and stacked it neatly beneath a tree, you went into the field to inspect, to make sure all the maize from the broken bags had been scooped up. The sun was in your eyes, and you didn’t notice the ten thousand people lining the edge of the field. You didn’t notice the first wave of them, or the second, or the third, until it was too late. They were stampeding toward you—sprinting, yelling, rioting. Hunchbacks and women with shriveled breasts; clubfoots and bloated children waving empty gourd bowls. Their faces twisted in pain, their eyes bloodshot and wild. Like some kind of nightmare. They came for you, but then they didn’t even touch you. They dove into the dirt at your feet; people were scrounging against one another for the few leftover kernels of maize, clawing the earth with their fingernails, bickering and breathing as one mass. So thin you could see the underworkings of their bodies, see right to their beating hearts.
And you—you just stood there, frozen, the hairs on the back of your neck straight up. You watched their fingers work the dirt, the curled-over kids gobbling raw kernels, hair yellowed from the Hunger. Even today, five years later, after five years in the Sudan, at the wise age of thirty, you still remember towering over them, holding yourself in until you couldn’t anymore, until you thought you might be losing it. No, my brother, you didn’t know anything until that moment, knew nothing at all about your place in this world until you—Jason Matus, American—stood among the people and were rendered completely invisible.
So wake now in Lorton, Virginia, invisible. Wake in this forty-five-year-old body with a walrus mustache, your waist thickening, skin loosening, the whole fleshy ornament of you beginning to schlump earthward. Rise in this cramped, brick two-bedroom among other cemented-together brick houses in a perfectly bland brick subdivision on a busy thoroughfare. Feel your way down the dark halls of your cramped brick house, past the photographs of your family—your wife, the teacher’s aide; your teenage son with the blinding fastball—to the kitchen with flowered wallpaper and linoleum floor. Drink coffee at the oak table you refinished yourself, sitting in a pool of one-hundred-watt light, and then head out the door for the one-hour bus ride to Washington, D.C., to the old Annex II building and your job in the Congressional Budget Office. Like every day. Like every day before and every day after.
This is the grind, your nine–to–five-thirty as a low-level government bureaucrat. Your life of put-on-the-same-old-clothes and take-the-same-bus and drink-the-same-bad-coffee and unjam-the-same-damn-Xerox-machine. Like, Do we have enough Bic pens around here? See, you’re nobody. Or you’re everybody—but either way, you’re invisible. Just another guy. The anonymous Joe up in the grandstand, hot dog in mouth, proudly watching his son pitch goose eggs into the seventh inning. Invisible—which is why sometimes January 13, 1982, feels like a dream, as if it all happened to another Lenny Skutnik who wasn’t you, who wasn’t twenty-nine then, with a newborn baby. That day, like every day, you woke, rose, and stumbled down the dark hall. You drank coffee. On the radio, clouds, some snow in the forecast. You were thinking: Snow? C’mon, this is D.C. You carpooled with your father, Marty, and some coworkers. At the office, you did the usual. Checked the copy machines, delivered the mail. Ate lunch in the cafeteria, a club sandwich, and every once in a while stole a look out the window.
By early afternoon, the snow was so thick it seemed as if the moon itself had blown up, was coming down in woolly clumps. Everything falling out of the sky but car fenders. Seemed impossible, but all federal workers were let out early. And suddenly you were heading back to the brick subdivision to shovel the walk. Some warm soup and television on the couch. Home sweet home.
But no. The interstate was snarled, a bumper-to-bumper crawl. Took one hour to get one mile. High drifts on the ground. Then, around 4:00 P.M., just as the light began to drain from the sky, you came to a full stop before the Fourteenth Street Bridge, just off the main runway of National Airport. There was a commotion; people were out of their cars, looking over the guardrail at the frozen Potomac. People began working their way down the embankment by the bridge, slipping and sliding—something urgent—and you followed them in that silver light, with bits of the moon falling on your head. You weren’t sure why, but you followed them down with your father and the other guys in your car. Your understanding of this came retroactively—all these people in the snow, running—as if you were speed-reading a story.
In the river were six people—splashing, fighting for air, trying to hang on to the tail of Air Florida flight 90, scheduled from Washington to Tampa. The plane had lumbered slowly down the tarmac on takeoff, banked hard left, and just couldn’t raise itself up in the air, fighting all that icy downfall. Skimmed the Fourteenth Street Bridge, took off several car roofs, decapitated a few drivers, knocked over a truck, then crashed through the ice and vanished. About seventy people were already on the river bottom, buckled fast to their seats. Never had a chance, those people. Never got the flight magazine out of the seat pocket or moved on to the peanuts-and-soft-drinks portion of this beautiful, sad life. Swallowed whole by the Potomac.
You saw this big gash in the ice, smelled the sickening smell of jet fuel, and you—you, Lenny Skutnik, government clerk—could see bodies floating around, human hands and legs trying to hang on to the wrecked tail of the plane like toddlers without water wings, one moment hurtling down a runway, then suddenly thrown tumbling into this slushy water. It didn’t compute: your life, then these bodies. A bystander, a sheet-metal worker, was already down by the water’s edge, and people were trying to tie a makeshift line around him. One woman was taking off her nylons to add to some jumper cables—her naked legs gooseflesh in that silver light. The sheet-metal worker had his coat and boots still on, and he began to wade into the river, thirty-three-degree water, sucked in hard, walked up to his knees, thighs, waist, walking as if he’d suddenly become the Tin Man, but that’s as far as he got before a helicopter appeared and you all pulled him back in.
Now everything moved in horrible slow motion. More people were slipping and sliding down the embankment, maybe fifty on the shore, watching the helicopter hover over the dazed, iced bodies in the river. Up on the bridge, there were more people, throwing rope to yet another survivor, who was trapped beneath the ice, trying to punch up through it. Over the open water, near the plane’s tail, the helicopter dangled a lifeline with an open-noosed strap. There were three men and three women there. One of the men just seemed to disappear beneath the surface—gone. Another struggled to shore, and then another made it, too. But one of the women—you could tell she was in trouble. Somewhere on the river’s bottom were her husband and her newborn baby, and somehow she had popped up on the surface, completely lost and pale, with a broken leg and some dim understanding that she needed to keep her mouth above the waterline, though the rest of her, that broken body of hers, just seemed to want to sink back down to her family.
The helicopter lowered itself, blowing everything sideways, bossing everything silver. Rotor blades shot wind under the skin of the wreckage and flipped the woman over with a piece of metal from the tail, flicked her like an insect. Flailing in that open water, wearing red, she reached for the lifeline, grabbed it, but then didn’t have the strength to hold on when the helicopter rose. Again and again, same thing. The pale woman somehow struggled up onto a slab of ice, wobbling, and the lifeline came down, and you saw her grabbing it in slow motion, excruciating, and her whole body dragged back in the water, her lame leg dragged behind her. But then she couldn’t hold on, let go with one hand, then two, and fell back in the water, in one pathetic, stonelike splash, washed under by the deafening sound of the chopper, which itself had become some kind of demented bird in this slow torture.
And suddenly, impossibly, out of nowhere—you! Her head underwater, fifty people gawking from shore, fixed in place, the sky spitting moon, and you just went. Like, outta here! Boots off! Reached down and yanked them off and tore off the puff jacket, just ripped loose of that thing, down to short sleeves—the same shirt as other days—and just leaped from the bank. Didn’t think, didn’t care. Just out of nowhere, roaring, skipping minutes, slicing between them, speeding time in order to get to this woman before she vanished, too. Out of nowhere, you, in the drink, in that slushie, windmilling like a sicko, a slashing fury of strokes. A blur. Fifty people standing there, and you, like, That’s it! Enough! She’s coming with me.
You powered to her, six ferocious strokes through electro-cutingly cold water, got to her at the give-up point, the sayonara-this-life split second, her eyes rolling back in her head. She was gone, unconscious and sinking, and you just grabbed her. You didn’t feel anything. Not cold—nothing. Claimed her, took her back from the river. Pulled her head up, then pushed her to shore, like water polo. Handed her off to a fireman who’d waded in. Dragged yourself to shore on your own. Stood up, soaking wet, breathing—yes, breathing!—looked back at the wreckage, and, once you knew everyone would get out, started up the embankment, picking up your puff jacket, looking around for your carpool, thinking: Time to go home. Let’s go.
But then some cops corralled you. Led you to an ambulance. You said, Is this gonna cost me anything? I don’t make no money. Free, they said. Someone put a hand on your back, and you got in. Noticed for the first time that your feet were cold. Missing your watch and a pack of cigarettes.
That’s when it began, that’s when the other Lenny Skutnik was born, when you realized what you’d actually done. Then found out it had been captured by a camera crew on the bank. At the hospital, they gave you a warm bath and some food, and as you were getting ready to go, they asked if you would answer some questions from the reporters. The story was out, the lead already written: In the nation’s capital today, a blizzard and a plane crash. Seventy-eight dead. A gaping hole in the ice, and debris floating in the water. Helicopters circling, looking for survivors. Rescue crews waiting on the shore to rush the victims to the hospital. The media already had that part down, had their victim, too: Priscilla Tirado, the woman in the water. Now they needed their hero.
So you answered a few questions: Why’d you do it? Something just told me, Go in after her. Would you do it again? Yes, I’d do it again. Simple stuff. Obvious. Time to get home.
But no one would let you go. There was just this great, gaping need for you—not the Lenny you, the brick-subdivision guy, the government functionary; no, they wanted the hero you, the part of you in them that they most needed to see and touch and believe in. The part of them that went diving into that icy water with you. On Nightline, Ted Koppel told you, It’s not only courage—there has to be a certain kind of magnificent insanity about it all. You said, Something just told me to go in after her.
The morning shows, newspapers, magazines paraded into your living room. They made you into a soap opera star. Lenny and Priscilla, Priscilla and Lenny. Hero and victim, victim and hero. They hauled Priscilla’s father-in-law, father of her dead husband, into your living room and tried to film him crying in front of you. You said, Wait a minute! Wait! Took him away from that camera, back into the bedroom. You wanted to beat the hell out of that network guy.
When people heard you lost your watch, you were offered a hundred new ones—then trips to Hawaii, Canada, Puerto Rico. President Ronald Reagan invited you to his State of the Union address, seated you and your wife up there in the balcony with his elegant wife, Nancy—nice, nice woman. President went drifting off on some yabble about American heroes, suddenly mentioned your name, and the whole place erupted. Democrats and Republicans leaped to their feet. Hear, hear! Lenny!
You got two thousand letters, some running deep with emotion. People wrote and said they were jumping up and down in their living rooms in front of their televisions, crying, screaming, watching that girl drown, saying, Do something! Do something! Some told you they had always been terrified to express their true feelings about anything in their real lives. Then suddenly they were jumping up and down in their living rooms, screaming, blubbering at the television. You came out of nowhere, dove into that dark river for them, pulled them out, too.
So that was it—you became public property, a character in your own life. Without wanting any of it, you were shot from a cannon, along the Icarus arc of American hero-hood. Didn’t matter that every day, today even, there are people out there pulling bodies from some wreckage. That there’s someone taking a bullet right now on some school playground. Seventy-eight people died in that crash. Hard to think of heroes when an image plays in your mind of that one survivor who surfaced in the wrong place, couldn’t break through; people on the bridge saw his face pressed against that ice, alive, guppy-mouthed. And then he was gone.
No, the sweetest thing about that day wasn’t the name they gave you—no, that seemed more like a joke—but when the day actually ended, when you got back to Lorton at about 2:00 A.M. Nearly seventeen years later, you remember it as if it were last night. Awesome tired. A little stiff. Everything in your brick subdivision was absolutely still and glittering with ice, strung yet with some Christmas lights, just solidly, beautifully there, and you started up the walk. Shoes crunching on the snow.
Never forget that: the clean smell of winter, the mysterious dark in all of those houses, and, inside, these men and women, your neighbors, drawn together, wrapped in each other, in their bedrooms sleeping—these mothers and fathers having begotten children who would one day beget their own children, and all of you wrapped together. Cemented together like these brick buildings. A light was on in your brick house, you remember that. A woman in the kitchen and a newborn kid. Your family, Lenny Skutnik. And the moon—it just kept falling, kept swirling down on you. It was suddenly as if you were drawn by a fast-moving current, reaching for a lifeline, moving toward some deeper place. And then you were up the steps, through the door, lost in that hundred-watt light. Home.
Now melt the snow, put the leaves back on the trees, recandle the sun to an unholy burn, turn up the heat. Home is this weltering hole called Tamarind Avenue. Home is a cyclone of red dust rising off this dirty concrete, this slow-motion manifestation of the devil. This oven of junkies and prostitutes and gangbangers in West Palm Beach, Florida—all of them stumbling between the street and their shotgun-shack shooting galleries. Down on Tamarind Avenue, it’s a war between good and evil.
Yeah, the devil is loose here—devouring your people, these good brothers and sisters. Every day, you wake up dressed for the war. You shave your head clean, wear a Tut beard. You batten black fatigues over this six-foot-three, three-hundred-pound mountain, this massive, immovable muscle that is you. You wear scuffed black army boots purchased at a military surplus store, hang an old African coin around your neck. Same likeness as you, see? You walk with a wooden staff, stride manfully among the masses, speaking your version of the Word: Who’s up? God is up. Who’s up? The Lord is up. Who’s up? We up. Plain and simple. You’re the pure-brother street preacher, known in these parts as Mr. Samuel Mohammed, the dude who shot one dope pusher four times at close range, then later burned down the neighborhood crack house. As you see it, both were acts of mercy. Yeah, mercy, my brother. Add that mercy to some TV face time, and it makes you what they call a folk hero.
But you’re not anything as earthly as a hero. You see yourself as the messiah. The one that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., implied would lead the people to the Promised Land. The commander, see? The cosmic commander. Plain and simple. Out here, there’s an affliction called urban psychosis. It’s like guinea worm—it starts on the inside, in your belly, then eats its way out through the flesh. A murder a day. Rape and AIDS. The candies of choice: crank, horse, crystal meth. Makes for tremors and itchy trigger fingers; turns people into needling, screwing, wanting animals—dogs. Live down here on Tamarind Avenue, and you’ll see bodies laid out like starfish under a purple sky after another drive-by, see bawling families doing a Saint Vitus’ dance around their dead. Live down here, and you’ll have some junkie roll you for five bucks, a SIG .45 pressed to your temple.
When you first came to Tamarind Avenue, you went to work at a laundromat, a place not far from the railroad tracks. You were college educated, played football at Jackson State, got a black belt in jujitsu, worked as a bodyguard for all of these big stars: Whitney, Boyz II Men, Luther. It was your job to suss out the succubus and incubus, to laser-beam the lowdown, petty psycho-freaks who gain celebrity by taking out a celebrity. It all fell to you, the big-boy gatekeeper, the pulling guard, the black-belt ass kicker. And now you, Mr. Samuel Mohammed, made change for the old ladies at the laundromat, turning their dollar bills into quarters, which were like tiny, silver pennies in your huge hands. But then you were preaching the Word, too: Watch it now! We comin’ up! Victory must be ours! Constellations of sweat spread over your smooth head from the heat of clothes dryers as you were railing against social injustice, the bureaucracy, and fleshly, human weaknesses. Time to pick ourselves up, hear! Ain’t no one gonna do it for us—no politician or white man, no one living in a mansion! Yeah, talk is cheap—chitter chatter, blither blather, politicking and overlooking! Plain and simple. Don’t need no fleshly promises; we stand here on high ground, on the promises of the Almighty!
The day you shot that teenage dope dealer, well, that had been brewing for a long time. Next to the laundromat was a grocery store, and that’s where, in broad daylight, these drug lords were cussing and selling crack and pushing prostitutes. You, Mr. Samuel Mohammed, sat with the old ladies as they washed and dried their pinafores and undergarments, their blouses and socks, talking to them about the Scriptures. And these old ladies, most of them were too afraid even to go to their mailboxes to get their Social Security checks, so when you heard the profanity outside, you approached these drug lords. One of them mouthed off—the boy was strung out, deep-fried—and there was a confrontation. A few days later, he came back and nailed you with Mace. And that’s when he threatened to kill you, kill the messiah.
On Tamarind, a threat like that is as good as having done it. And the next time he found you at the laundromat, he was waving a gun. That was his mistake, my friend, for instantly he was disarmed of his weapon, and without thinking, you turned it on him. Four shots that took him off his feet, blew him right parallel to the ground, floating up in the air and down again. Left him lying there leaking his own blood like thick oil. Then you prayed for him. On the very spot where you shot him, you prayed for him. Prayed to your Father. And so the boy lived. The Father heard the prayer of his only begotten Son and let the boy live—your first miracle. They took him away in an ambulance, and you never got charged. Cops didn’t see it as mercy but self-defense.
So God was urging you to make a stand here—Jesus against the money changers. The guinea worm was everywhere: You had a young man die in your arms, shot in the head on the street. Made no sense. And now you were fixated on the incubus and succubus in this shotgun shack across the street—a slave quarter is what you called it. Later, in court, your lawyer would say you were afflicted with urban psychosis, haunted by ghosts. He would say that you snapped. But it was simpler than that: You woke one morning, bought a five-dollar gas container, filled it with unleaded, stalked across the street to that slave shack. Some hapless bystander tried to stop you, three hundred righteous moving pounds of you, and you said, Move! And he moved.
Kicked down the door then, almost off its hinges. Doused the place with gasoline, splattered it until the house filled with that smell of high-octane salvation. Made sure no one was there, then lit a match and threw it on the floor. And the whole thing leaped with flames. A pyre. Fire funneling up the walls and cascading back down them; ceiling coming down in a rain of magma. Couch, chairs, garbage, termites—all of it shrinking on itself, consuming itself. You could feel the heat on your back as you walked away. An awesome heat. Heat hotter than the street, yeah. People were pointing at you, murmuring, but you didn’t run—you just went back to the laundromat and prayed. Later, when you saw a cop car cruising the neighborhood, you flagged it down, said to the officer: I’m the one you need to arrest.
You were offered a bargain on a couple of felony counts: plead guilty before the judge and get a reduced sentence. Your lawyer, Mr. Sam Berry, chatted with you, accompanied you to court—a no-brainer, six years maybe commuted to two and a half—and when the judge asked you how you meant to plead, you said, without hesitation, Not guilty. Mr. Sam Berry cleared his ear canal, perplexed. Can’t cop a plea if you say not guilty! That’s legal cognitive dissonance. Mr. Sam Berry’s mouth dropped. Like, What the hell are you talking about, man? You did it; you admit it! Let’s cop a plea and be done! And you: Yes, I did it, but I’m not guilty. I’m not guilty on earth as it is in heaven. Aim to prove that, yeah.
So Mr. Sam Berry went to work. Everybody, it seemed, had heard about you. Calls came from the networks: You were their vigilante, what America needed. An anonymous supporter put up $15,000 for your bond. The little old ladies testified to your good name. A detective told the jury that what you did was wrong but admitted there were many who admired your guts, your honesty. Yes, you did it, but look around. It was your obligation. No help from the government, no help from the cops. After all, you had a responsibility to your people, to protect them and find them greener pastures. To carry them on your broad shoulders, to keep them from the mouth of the wolf. Plain and simple.
See, you came to Tamarind Avenue to destroy the wolf.
The jury exonerated you on the arson charges after less than an hour’s deliberation. Go free, cosmic commander, take back the streets.
Which is where you are now—after these 37 years of your human life, after 259 dog years, after one blink of a cosmic eye—with the sun piercing your head on Tamarind Avenue, melting the asphalt. The sidewalk gives with each one of your oversized steps, Mr. Samuel Mohammed. The thud of your big leather combat boots sounds out a warning. He is coming! He is coming! Your fingers are the size of peninsulas; your biceps rise beneath your fatigues like two Vesuviuses. Walking staff is a redwood tree. You’re a planet unto yourself.
You’re so big, in fact, you must love yourself more, pride yourself with extra pride, gulp additional air, all in order to share your love with your earthly brothers and sisters. To bring them the Word. You must be prepared to lay down your life for them—and the more your life is worth, the more willing you have to be to lay it down. That is what the good man believes, the righteous man, yeah. Let them call you freak or hero, murderer or messiah, Mr. Samuel Mohammed. You’re the massive one-man black-belt power attack. And on Tamarind Avenue today, where there once stood a slave-quarter crack house, there’s nothing but an empty lot of dust and broken bottles. Lay it down on the shattered glass and red dust, pure, messianic brother, and call it the Promised Land.
Now check yourself one more time. Do you feel strong? Do you have two feet planted on this earth and two lungs that work? Say, a nice ranch house on a deepwater bayou in St. Pete Beach, Florida? Then it’s true: You ain’t a hero, sir. You’re fifty-four years old and alive, but you ain’t a hero. Fishing your days, watching these heartbreaking sunsets come down in indigo tracers over the Gulf of Mexico. How many times have you seen your reflection in the bathroom mirror and wondered what that ornate piece of brass in your bottom drawer rightly makes you, anyway?
Name: Gary Lee Littrell. Rank: command sergeant major first class, U.S. Army, retired. In khakis and colorful short-sleeves now. Square, open face, steel-blue eyes, trimmed hair, an impish grin, and a muscle in your jaw that pulses when you turn serious. Career military; solid as a fence post. Out this morning in the Eagle Five, an eighteen-foot fishing boat named for your call sign, out with your son—fine boy with the same exact eyes—reeled in six smart-looking trout, fried ’em up for lunch. Sit around in these twilights, out by the dock with a couple of friends who live in the neighborhood, telling fish stories, checking the water for the occasional manatee.
Your buddies each have the medal, too. You encouraged both of them to come to St. Pete Beach. They had their reasons for needing a new life. You said, Come on down and we’ll get you set up. And now you sit out here together, beneath the palm fronds and American flag, drinking Cokes, talking fish at sunset, marveling at the manatees, big, white, ghostly things, gentle as can be, going extinct because these speeding prop boats slice them up in the water, gouge their backs. Really, just talking about anything but—Hey, it’s a hot, humid one, ain’t it? Lookee at that sky. Sure is gorgeous! But maybe you’re all thinking it anyway: Not unlike Vietnam. Not unlike it at all, thank you.
See, the past belongs in the past, and yet much of who you are today is still back there, somewhere near Dak Seang, in Kontum Province, bordering Cambodia. A real place under a strange sky on a hot, humid night not unlike this one. In April 1970, you, sir, were a twenty-six-year-old American adviser moving with a ranger battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers and three other Americans, including Lieutenant Raymond Green, your soul-on-ice comrade in arms, your brown-skinned double. You drank with him, slept next to him, shadowed each other everywhere. You both had the smell of the country on you, spoke Vietnamese, ate your meals with the men. They were good soldiers, vengeance fighters, brothers.
Hill 763 rose from paddies through chokes of bamboo to a bald nub at its peak, most of it set beneath a double canopy of jungle, the kind so thick it turns day into night, creates its own cloying underworld. Nearly five hundred of you humped up, then settled down on that hill to clear a forward-fire support base. You established what you thought was a safe defensive perimeter. Until you heard the first mortar rounds—that sudden, sickening pit in your stomach—and when they hit, things got ugly fast. A burning, sulfury smell of flesh and powder. Bodies scattered everywhere across this sudden crater.
Your first realization was that Lieutenant Green, who’d just been next to you, was gone—not only dead but torn apart, no longer whole. Ornaments in a tree. Everything inside you went numb; gravity tripled and brought you to a knee. The two other Americans were seriously wounded, mortars and rockets sizzling up the hill, and, folks, it was just you now, you and maybe three hundred of your South Vietnamese brothers left to stand down five thousand Vietcong moving on your position. The odds did not favor you, Sergeant Littrell.
You’d seen other men just surrender, curl up out of fear in a bunker, wetting their pants, letting the gods have their way. But no, it wasn’t even a decision; it was reflex: You decided to fight. Lifted your M16 and went forward, drove yourself through the air. Move feet, run. Go, boy! Through hails of gunfire and mortar attacks, you collected the injured, reorganized the battalion. You worked the radio until you had the damn thing shot out of your hands, found another and kept going. It turned dark, a sky with no moon, and you placed the wounded near a makeshift landing pad, then went out there waving flares and strobes to signal a medevac. That brought on enemy machine guns, fire so furious no Dustoff could land. Even then, you waved the light all night. Out there like some haw lantern, marking your position. A ghost who wouldn’t fall. Faced with your inevitable death, you didn’t see the Holy Spirit—no, somehow you became the Holy Spirit. Bullets passed through without touching.
Four days and nights without food or sleep—misery and things from a nightmare. Maniacal, sir—maniacal. Shots of adrenaline and morphine to stay awake, jacked right to the ceiling. Spoke in Vietnamese to your brothers. Rallied them, lifted them up. Danh! Fight! The enemy massed for three human-wave assaults, and you, Sergeant Littrell, went to where they were coming, could hear their voices yourself in the bamboo, a deep, spooky feeling, and called in air strikes to within fifty yards of your own body, five-hundred-pound bombs that knocked you off your feet. To the ground, then up again. Again and again. Just like a Sunday stroll.
People dying like so many lepers around you. And bodies. Bodies everywhere. Then, on the fourth day, in a delirium, beneath another hail of mortars, when the will to fight had begun to seep from your body, you accepted your own death, too. You didn’t think about your mama, didn’t have some private conversation with God. Didn’t have to wonder if you’d been a good man. Or what freedom meant to you. No, you just let everything get peaceful. You just stayed inside yourself for a moment, let yourself fill some small space on this planet one last time, fill it completely; like coming home to yourself, the weight of your body on this earth, your two feet on the ground, your lungs sucking air. Then you opened your eyes.
And yes, as sure as you were going to die, there came the miraculous reversal, the deus ex machina, the cavalry! Vietcong still swarming up Hill 763 for your big send-off to the Promised Land, ambushing and mortaring, grenading and machine-gunning, and suddenly you had a sky full of American bombers. Radioed them down on your position. Flying now yourself. You were just a shadow lost in these deafening bomb blasts, calling in more and more and more. And every time a bomb dropped farther down the hill, you and your hobbling men scrambled into the new crater, surrounded by amulets, all these Vietcong body parts. You carried one of your injured men on your back, dragged two others. And you all kept moving. Until there was nothing but silence. Until you’d come down off that hill with 41 walking wounded—you, impossibly, were only dehydrated—and the choppers filled the sky on their way to recover your 431 dead.
Later, when they fixed a big steak that you couldn’t touch because your stomach had shrunk on itself like a dead leaf and you were frazzled on morphine and adrenaline, about to get sucked into some tsunami of withdrawal—when the Holy Spirit finally departed your body—you couldn’t remember half of what had happened up there, what you’d said on the radio, how you’d danced with the flares. You were empty. But then there was no language for what you remembered.
President Nixon put this Medal of Honor around your neck so you would never forget. The citation called you “superhuman.” And yet you never felt weaker. Everywhere you went now, you were followed by the 431 dead men. Sometimes in the mirror, it was Lieutenant Green looking back.
So check yourself, sir. Lounging by the dock in St. Pete Beach with your two buddies, Sergeant Frank Miller and Captain Ron Ray. Both medal winners, too. Lit upon by the enemy, their bodies grenaded and machine-gunned, each literally half dead, they got up off their backs and they fought. Maniacally. Driven by some reflex beneath the reflex. Now, like you, they have graying hair and thickening bellies. Even today, it’s hard to know what the medal makes you feel: proud, thankful, strong. Imperfect, lonely, mortal. Days it makes you feel more like an outsider. Makes you feel like a fraud, because all the real heroes are dead.
But then lookee at this sunset, this sky full of indigo tracers and deep-coral colors. There’s an American flag luffing in a soft breeze. There are two men at this table—Sergeant Miller and Captain Ray—who know without having to say. You just sit, drinking Cokes, telling fish stories. Talking about everything and nothing. Some nights, they’ve got your back covered, help carry you down that hill without saying anything about it.
There was one night out in this deepwater bayou when you, Command Sergeant Major Gary Lee Littrell, went to the dock alone, just stood there a while, watching the pelicans, trying to feel something. When you looked down in the dark water, you were surprised by two huge, white manatees looking back at you with those mournful, wrinkled eyes. As if they’d come from another world, silently floating there, as if they alone possessed some secret, wordless language. They were just hovering there, underwater, big, gentle animals with gouged backs. These vanishing, beautiful things showed themselves to you once and then were gone.
So it’s now been five years in the Sudan, Jason Matus, and you’ve been given a Dinka name: Majok dit. A black bull with a white crown on its head. You’ve been offered gifts—ivory walking sticks and golden pipes made from bullet casings and goats, more skinny goats than you would ever know what to do with. They might be starving, but the Dinka will give you, an American, their last goat.
You came into the country as an innocent, and now you’re experienced. The fish has grown strong even as some of your coworkers have been killed. You’ve waded through thick crowds at hundreds of food drops, reached out to clasp thousands of reaching hands, lost your mind in the heat, pushed and yelled for people to clear the drop zone, and been trampled in riots from the Hunger. You’ve sat in the dirt, covered in red dust, trying to assess caloric intake and the nutritional value of shea butter nut, lalob, wild rice, cassava, tubers, yams, and tamarind. You talk slowly, like Boris Badenov, yeah? Understand, my brother? Listen, what I say might save you.
Five years, the biggest airlift in history, and yet it’s the same famine, the same war as when you arrived. The same starving people, fleeing their oppressors; the same boll weevils in the dust at your feet, kids scrounging for maize; the same skeletons at the feeding centers and shrivel-breasted women holding dead babies. You yourself have run for your life, sought refuge from the bombs out in the bush for two days until you waved your Mylar blanket at a search plane. Thought you might drown out there in all that nothingness. At one food drop, you were called away by some Dinka. They took you a short distance and pointed at something in the dust near a fallen woman, and you nearly threw up. She had miscarried trying to lug a 110-pound bag of maize. That stayed with you. That made you wonder: Are we doing any good here?
Some of your comrades don’t think so. They say you’ve all grown cynical and tired. They say the rest of the world, those people sending money because of a commercial, are really funding the Stone Age, allowing these half-mad militia leaders to blow one another apart, keep everyone else down. Food has become a weapon, the reason for war. And no one wants to end the fighting, because everyone is power tripping and making good money on this thing. Everyone gets to be a hero. Even you, Jason Matus. Even you.
But … no. That makes you grimace. Sure, you’re paid for this. But it’s not as if you’re pretending to be Mother Teresa. No, what pisses you off is the alternative: What happens if everyone packs up and goes home, leaves the Dinka and the Nuer and the Luo without maize and sorghum, unimix and high-energy biscuits? More people starve, more die. Is that the answer?
Sorry, you believe. It’s been five years, and there will be more. See, there’s a book you carry with you everywhere in your mind, by this guy Paulo Freire, who says conflict is the midwife of conscience, yeah? And that the ideal of freedom isn’t just some chimera, isn’t some bauble located outside of us, floating around like satellites in space. No, it’s something we have to reach out and grab, something we must ingest and then, our stomachs full, use for our own completion. This isn’t about money or heroes, my brother; this is about capturing freedom. This is about laying it down for the people.
And it’s finally about this: the end of another long day. A strong, dusty wind has picked up. You’re tired, Jason Matus, bone tired. You’re feeling mortal beneath this African sky, this slow, heavy tide of silver clouds closing in over your head. Passing through villages on your way home, you feel beaten, alone, an outsider. Evening fires are lit. People are gathered by their tukels, circled around bags of food you helped give them earlier. They’re placing great, golden handfuls of maize in huge, hollowed trunks that they use as mortars and pestles.
So lost in thought, you almost don’t notice that the people are smiling at you. They’re smiling and speaking to you. Mothers and fathers in fluttering djellabas. Mali madit. Big peace, my brother. And from somewhere below, armies of naked kids grab your fingers and carry you along, cheering and laughing, bellies blown out. They’re excitedly jabbering in Dinka, asking you, this white ghost, to be their friend, and you’re jabbering back in English, asking them to be your friend.
And that’s when the pounding begins: these heavy, magnificent thuds—these thick, rounded branches pulverizing the maize. Crushing it for soup. There’s pounding all through the country tonight, echoing like beating hearts. You can hear it now—everywhere. Listen. The fires are lit; the children are dancing. Do you know how good that sound is? Do you know how that feels, the way it moves the earth that moves your body? How deep and real? See, that’s what a little night music can really sound like. That’s when you know you’ve earned this night of sleep. So lay it down now, my pure brother. Lay it down and sleep.