He was a gawky kid with too many teeth, not much older than the kids I know now. I wasn’t much older then than they are now either. What, twenty-two? I was twenty-two. Which made Maurice—isn’t that a fucked-up name to put on a kid? Maurice St. Pierre—which made Maurice twenty. And he went into that hut in that village, so small it wasn’t even a village, just a collection of farmers’ hooches, and instead of herding everybody out before we torched it, he shot someone. When I went in he was buttoning up, and a child, a toddler, was dead three or four feet away, a red hole in its face where the nose had been, and the mother, her pants dragging from one ankle, was crying uncontrollably. At least I could see her face moving as if in hysteria, and the water bubbling out of her nose and mouth. She was crawling toward the baby, and Maurice looked at me and mouthed “What the fuck” and shot the woman and then I shot him, a short burst, a burst of three. From the time I’d entered the hut I hadn’t been able to hear, but now I could hear again. I heard the burst and I saw Maurice’s body snap backward and then I turned and there was another soldier standing at the entrance, staring at me. I can’t remember his name now, or what he looked like, but I remember how dark his silhouette was with the bright noon light behind him. And I got on the radio and told the commander what I had done.
I told it differently, of course. The way I told it was that I could see Maurice intended to shoot the woman and I told him to put his weapon down but he swung his rifle toward her and I fired but I was too late, he fired a quarter of a second before I did and, yes, I was trying to prevent a murder, a second murder, counting the child. This is the way I told it to the commander and this is the way I told it to the investigator Division sent down.
And everything was okay. I don’t know what the soldier whose name I can’t remember told anybody, but everything went okay for me. I couldn’t stay with my platoon, of course. I had only a month before my tour was up and I spent that at Division on special projects, which meant I didn’t have a job. But the war was ending, at least the infantry’s role in it, and I went home only a little before the entire division stood down.
So I had murdered someone, but only I knew it, and possibly the soldier who had been standing at the entrance to the hut. When I thought about it, I didn’t think about the kid with the hole in its face, nor even Maurice St. Pierre. When I thought about it, I thought first about the woman, naked from her hips down, in agony, trying to reach her child. Then I thought of Maurice’s mouth moving, saying “What the fuck.”
At some point in the years since, although I couldn’t hear anything at the time, I began to hear him say it, I began to hear his voice behind it. Memory does that, doesn’t it? It isn’t a matter of playing tricks. Memory tries to make your life easier. It combines events, it leaves things out. The purpose of memory is to help you get through your life with a notion of yourself that is acceptable to you. If you are true to what you remember, you are lying, even if you do not know you are.
Someone I used to know, a teacher, told me this story. I was interviewing him for a study on the impact of war on the lives of its participants. Eventually I abandoned the project. I was not able to define to my own satisfaction the word “participant” and the project grew beyond my capacity to manage it.