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Again, the ant runs off the beach.
The gunship is halfway back to the ants in the water when the ant on
the beach reappears and opens fire.
This time the gunship pilot brings his ship in low enough to decapitate
the ant with the chopper's skids. The gunship fires.
The ant fires.
Machine-gun bullets knock the ant over.
The gunship swings around to verify that it is a confirmed kill.
As machine-gun bullets snap into the wet sand, the ant stands up, aims
its tiny AK-47 assault rifle, and fires a thirty-round magazine on full
automatic.
The Cobra gunship explodes, splits open like a bloated green egg. The
gutted carcass of aluminum and plexiglass bounces along, suspended in the
air, burning, trailing black smoke. And then it falls.
The flaming chopper hits the river and the flowing water sucks it down.
The ant does not move. The ant fires another magazine on full
automatic. The ant is shooting at the sky.
Tired of firing into floating corpses, the remaining two gunships
attack.
The ant walks off the beach.
The gunships hit the beach and sand dunes with every weapon they've
got. They circle and circle and circle like predatory birds. Then, out of
ammunition and out of fuel, they buzz straight into the horizon and vanish.
Delta Company applauds and cheers and whistles. "Get some! Number one!
Out-fucking-standing! Payback is a motherfucker!"
Alice says, "That guy was a grunt."
While we wait for the gunboats to come and take us back across the
River of Perfumes we talk about how the NVA grunt was one hell of a hard
individual and about how it would be okay if he came to America and married
all our sisters and about how we all hope that he will live to be a hundred
years old because the world will be diminished when he's gone.
The next morning, Rafter Man and I get the map coordinates of a mass
grave from some green ghouls and we hump over to the site to get Captain
January his atrocity photographs.
The mass grave smells really bad--the odor of blood, the stink of
worms, decayed human beings. The Arvin snuffies doing the digging in a
school yard have all tied olive-drab skivvy shirts around their faces, but
casualties due to uncontrollable puking are heavy.
We see corpses of Vietnamese civilians who have been buried alive,
faces frozen in mid-scream, hands like claws, the fingernails bloody and
caked with damp earth. All of the dead people are grinning that hideous,
joyless grin of those who have heard the joke, of those who have seen the
terrible secrets of the earth. There's even the corpse of a dog which Victor
Charlie could not separate from its master.
There are no corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. However,
the green ghouls assure us that they have seen such corpses elsewhere. So I
borrow some demolition wire from the Arvin snuffies and, crushing the stiff
bodies with my knee until dry bones crack, I bind up a family, assembled at
random from the multitude--a man, his wife, a little boy, a little girl,
and, of course, their dog. As a final touch, I wire the dog's feet together.
Noon at the MAC-V compound. We say good-bye to Cowboy and to the
Lusthog Squad.
Cowboy has found a stray puppy and is carrying the bony little animal
inside his shirt. Cowboy says to me, "Keep your ass down, bro. Scuttlebutt
is, the Lusthog Squad is headed up to Khe Sanh, a very hairy area. But no
sweat; we can hack it. And maybe they got some horses up there. So if you
ever feel hard enough to be a real Marine, a grunt, bop up to see us."
I pet Cowboy's puppy. "Never happen. But you take care, you piece of
shit. We've got a date with your sister I don't care to miss."
Rafter Man says good-bye to Alice and to the other guys in Cowboy's
squad. He shakes hands with Cowboy and pets Cowboy's puppy. In my best John
Wayne voice I say, "See you later, Mother."
Animal Mother says, "Not if I see you first."
Rafter Man and I ditty-bop down Route One, south, toward Phu Bai. We
hump in crushing heat for hours, looking for a ride. But the sun is without
mercy and there are no convoys in sight.
We sit in the shade by the road. "It's hot," I say. "It's very hot.
Wish that old mamasan was here. I'd souvenir beaucoup money for one Coke..."
Rafter Man stands up. "No sweat. I can find her..." Rafter Man
ditty-bops into the road.
I start to say something about how it might be a good idea for us to
stay together. There are still plenty of NVA stragglers in the area.
"Rafter..." But then I remember that Rafter Man has got his first confirmed
kill. Rafter Man can take care of himself.
The deck trembles. A tank? I look up, but I can't see anything on the
road. Yet nothing on earth sounds as big as a tank, nothing produces that
terrible rumble of metal like a tank. It shakes my bones. I jump up, weapon
ready. I look up and down the road. Nothing. But all around me is the clamor
of rolling iron and the odor of diesel fuel.
Rafter Man is walking across the road. He does not hear the invisible
tank. He does not feel the mechanical earthquake.
I double-time after him. "Rafter!"
Rafter Man turns around. He grins. And then we both see it. The tank is
an object of heavy metal forged from a cold shadow, a ghost with substance.
The black mechanical phantom comes for us, dark ectoplasm rolling in the
sun. The blond tank commander stands in the turret hatch, staring straight
ahead and into the beyond, laughing.
Rafter Man turns around.
I say, "Don't move."
But Rafter looks at me, panic on his face.
I grab his shoulder.
Rafter Man pulls away and runs.
The tank is bearing down on me. I don't move.
The tank swerves, misses me, roars past like a big iron dragon. The
tank runs over Rafter Man and crushes him beneath its steel treads. And then
it's gone.
Rafter Man likes on his back in the dirt, a crushed dog spilling out of
its skin. Rafter Man looks at me the way he looked at me that day at the
Freedom Hill PX on Hill 327 in Da Nang. His eyes are begging me for an
explanation.
Rafter Man has been cut in half just below his new NVA rifle belt. His
intestines are pink rope all over the deck. He is trying to pull himself
back in, but it doesn't work. His guts are wet and slippery and he can't
hold them in. He tries to reinsert his spilling guts back into his severed
torso. He tries very hard to keep the dirt off of his intestines as he
works.
Rafter Man stops trying to save himself and, instead, just stares at me
with an expression that might be found on the face of a person who wakes up
with a dead bird in his mouth.
"Sarge..."
"Don't call me 'Sarge,'" I say.
I kneel down and pick up Rafter's black-body Nikon. I say, "I'll tell
Mr. Payback about your belt and about your SKS..." I want so much to cry,
but I can't cry--I'm too tough.
I stop talking to Rafter Man because Rafter Man is dead. Talking to
dead people is not a healthy habit for a living person to cultivate and
lately I have been talking to dead people quite a lot. I guess I've been
talking to dead people ever since I made my first confirmed kill. After my
first confirmed kill, talking to corpses began to make more sense than
talking to people who had not yet been wasted.
In Viet Nam you see corpses almost every day. At first you try to
ignore them. You don't want people to think you're curious. Nobody wants to
admit that corpses are not old hat to them; nobody wants to be a New Guy. So
you see lumps of dirty rags. And after a while you begin to notice that the
lumps of dirty rags have arms and legs and heads. And faces.
The first time I saw a corpse, back when I was a New Guy, I wanted to
vomit, just like in the movies. The corpse was an NVA grunt who died in a
great orange ball of jellied gasoline near Con Thien. The napalm left a
crumbled heap of ashes in the fetal position. His mouth was open. His
charred fingers were covering his eyes.
The second time I really looked at a corpse I was embarrassed. The
corpse was an old Vietnamese woman with teeth which had turned black after a
lifetime of chewing betel nuts. The woman had been hit by something bigger
than small-arms fire. She was killed in a crossfire between ROK Marines and
NVA grunts in Hoi An. She seemed so exposed in death, so vulnerable.
My third corpse was a decapitated Marine. I stumbled over him on an
operation in the A Shau valley. My reaction was curiosity. I wondered what
the rounds had felt like as they entered his body, what his last thought
was, what his last sound was at the moment of impact. I marveled at the
ultimate power of death. A big strong American boy, so vibrant and
red-blooded, had become within minutes a yellow lump of inflexible meat. And
I understood that my own weapon could do this dark magic thing to any human
being. With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any enemy with
just the slightest pressure of one finger. And, knowing that, I was less
afraid.
The fourth corpse is the last one I remember. After that they've
blurred together, a mountain of faceless dead. But I think that the fourth
corpse was the old papasan in the conical white hat I saw on Route One. The
old man had been run over by a six-by as he squatted in the road taking a
shit. All I remember is that when I marched by, flies exploded off the old
man like pieces of shrapnel.
I got my first confirmed kill with India Three-Five.
I was writing a feature article about how the grunts at the Rockpile on
Route Nine had to sweep the road for mines every morning before any traffic
could use the road. There was a fat gunny who insisted on walking point with
a metal detector. The fat gunny wanted to protect his people. He believed
that fate killed the careless. He stepped on an antitank mine. A man is not
supposed to be heavy enough to detonate an antitank mine, but the gunny was
pretty fat.
The earth opened up and hell came out with a roar that jarred my bones.
The fat gunny was launched into the clean blue sky, green and round and
loose-jointed like a broken doll. I watched the fat gunny float up to heaven
and then a wall of heat slammed into me and I collided with the deck.
The fat gunny floated back to earth.
Although shrapnel had stung my face and peppered my flak jacket, I was
not afraid. I was very calm. From the moment the mine detonated I knew I was
a dead man, and there was nothing I could do.
Behind me a man was cursing. The man was a Navy corpsman. The
corpsman's right hand had been split open and he was holding his fingers
together with his good hand and cursing and yelling for a corpsman.
Then I understood that the "shrapnel" I'd felt had only been shattered
gravel.
Grunts from the security squad were crawling into the bushes, turning
outboard, weapons ready.
Still confused about why I was still alive I got to my feet and
double-timed to the little pit that had been torn into the road by the
explosion.
Two grunts were double-timing across a meadow toward a treeline. I
followed them, my finger on the trigger of my M-16, eager to pour invisible
darts of destruction into the shadows.
The two grunts and I ran until we passed through the treeline and
emerged on the edge of a vast rice paddy. There the fat gunny was floating
on his back in the shallow water, surrounded by dark pieces of
do-it-yourself fertilizer.
The grunts spread a poncho under him while I stood security. Both of
the gunny's legs had been torn off at the pelvis. I saw one of his fat legs
floating nearby so I picked it up out of the water and threw it in on top of
him.
We all took hold of the poncho and started carrying the heavy load back
to the road. I was breathing hard, and the black anger was pounding inside
my chest. I was watching the trees, hoping I'd see movement.
And then out of nowhere a man appeared, a tiny, ancient farmer who was
at the same time ridiculous and dignified. The ancient farmer had a hoe on
his shoulder and was wearing the obligatory conical white hat. His chest was
bony and he looked so old. His sturdy legs were scarred. The ancient farmer
didn't speak to us. He just stood there beside the trail with rice shoots in
his hand, calm, his mind rehearsing the hard work he had to do that day.
The ancient farmer smiled. He saw the frantic children with their fat
burden of death and he felt sorry for us. So he smiled to show that he
understood what we were going through. Then my M-16 was vibrating and
invisible metal missiles were snapping through the ancient farmer's body as
though he were a bag of dry sticks.
The ancient farmer looked at me. As he fell forward into the dark water
his face was tranquil and I could see that he understood.
After my first confirmed kill I began to understand that it was not
necessary to understand. What you do, you become. The insights of one moment
are blotted out by the events of the next. And no amount of insight could
ever alter the cold, black fact of what I had done. I was caught up in a
constricting web of darkness, and, like the ancient farmer, I was suddenly
very calm, just as I had been calm when the mine detonated, because there
was nothing I could do. I was defining myself with bullets; blood had
blemished my Yankee Doodle dream that everything would have a happy ending,
and that I, when the war was over, would return to hometown America in a
white silk uniform, a rainbow of campaign ribbons across my chest, brave
beyond belief, the military Jesus.
I think about my first kill for a long time. At twilight a corpsman
appears. I explain to him that Marines never abandon their dead or wounded.
The corpsman looks at each of Rafter Man's pupils several times.
"What?"
I shrug. I say, "Payback is a motherfucker."
"What?" The corpsman is confused. The corpsman is obviously a New Guy.
"Tanks for the memories..." I say, because I do not know how to tell
him how I feel. You're a machine gunner who has come to the end of his last
belt. You're waiting, staring out through the barbed wire at the little men
who are assaulting your position. You see their tiny toy-soldier bayonets
and their determined, eyeless faces, but you're a machine gunner who has
come to the end of his last belt and there's nothing you can do. The little
men are going to grow and grow and grow--illuminated by the fluid, ghostly
fire of a star flare--and then they're going to run up over you and cut you
up with knives. You see this. You know this. But you're a machine gunner who
has come to the end of his last belt and there's nothing you can do. In
their distant fury the little men are your brothers and you love them more
than you love your friends. So you wait for the little men to come and you
know you'll be waiting for them when they come because you no longer have
anywhere else to go...
The corpsman is confused. He does not understand why I'm smiling. "Are
you okay, Marine?" Yes, he is a New Guy for sure.
I ditty-bop down the road. The corpsman calls after me. I ignore him.
A mile away from the place of fear I stick out my thumb.
I'm dirty, unshaven, and dead tired.
A Mighty Mite slams on its brakes. "MARINE!"
I turn, thinking I've got some slack, thinking I've got a ride.
A poge colonel pounces out of the jeep, marches up to face me.
"MARINE!"
I think: Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me? "Aye-aye, sir."
"Corporal, don't you know how to execute a hand salute?"
"Yes, sir." I salute. I hold the salute until the poge colonel snaps
his hand to his starched barracks cover and I hold the salute for an extra
couple of second before cutting it away sharply. Now he poge colonel has
been identified as an officer to any enemy snipers in the area.
"Corporal, don't you know how to stand to attention?"
Right away I start wishing I was back in the shit. In battles there are
no police, only people who want to shoot you. In battles there are no poges.
Poges try to kill you on the inside. Poges leave your body intact because
your muscles are all they want from you anyway.
I stand to attention, wobbling slightly beneath the sixty pounds of
gear I'm humping.
The poge colonel has a classic granite jaw. I'm sure that the Marine
Corps must have a strict examination at the officers' candidate school at
Quantico designed to eliminate all officer candidates who lack the granite
jaw.
His jungle utilities are razor-creased, starched to the consistency of
green armor. He executes a flawless Short Pause, a favorite technique of
leaders of men, designed to inflict its victim with fatal insecurity. Having
no desire to damage the colonel's self-confidence, I respond with my best
Parris Island rendition of I-am-only-an-enlisted-person-I-try-to-be-humble.
"Marine..." The colonel stands ramrod straight. This stance is the Air
of Command, intended to intimidate me, despite the fact that I'm a foot
taller and outweigh him by fifty pounds. The colonel investigates the
underside of my chin. "Marine..." He likes that word. "What is that on your
body armor, Marine?"
"Sir?"
The poge colonel stands on tiptoe. For a moment I'm afraid he's going
to bite me in the neck. But he only wants to breathe on me. His smile is
cold. His skin is too white. "Marine..."
"Sir?"
"I asked you a question."
"You mean this peace button, sir?"
"What is it?"
"A peace symbol, sir..."
I wait patiently while the colonel tries to remember the "Maintaining
Interpersonal Relationships with Subordinate Personnel" chapter of his OCS
textbook.
The poge colonel continues to breathe all over my face. His breath
smells of mint. Marine Corps officers are not allowed to have bad breath,
body odor, acne pimples, nor holes in their underwear. Marine Corps officers
are not allowed to have anything that has not been issued to them.
The colonel jabs my button with a forefinger, gives me a fairly decent
Polished Glare. His blue eyes sparkle. "That's right, son, act innocent. But
I know what that button means."
"Yes, sir!"
"It's a ban-the-bomb propaganda button. Admit it!"
"No, sir." I'm in real pain. The man who invented standing at attention
obviously never humped any gear.
"Then what does it mean?"
"It's just a symbol for peace, sir."
"Oh, yeah?" He breathes faster, up close now, as though he can smell
lies.
"Yes, Colonel, it's just--"
"MARINE!"
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
"WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!"
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
The poge colonel moves around me, stalks me. "Do you call yourself a
Marine?"
"Well..."
"WHAT?"
"Crossed fingers, king's-X. "Yes, sir."
"Now seriously, son..." The colonel begins an excellent Fatherly
Approach. "Just tell me who gave you that button. You can level with me. You
can trust me. I only want to help you." The poge colonel smiles.
The colonel's smile is funny so I smile, too.
"Where did you get that button, Marine?" The colonel looks hurt. "Don't
you love your country, son?"
"Well..."
"Do you believe that the United States should allow the Vietnamese to
invade Viet Nam just because they live here?" The poge colonel is struggling
to regain his composure. "Do you?"
My shoulders are about to fall off. My legs are falling asleep. "No,
sir. We should bomb them back to the Stone Age...sir."
"Confess, Corporal, confess that you want peace."
I give him a Short Pause. "Doesn't the colonel want peace...sir?"
The colonel hesitates. "Son, we've all got to keep our heads until this
peace craze blows over. All I have ever asked of my boys is that they obey
my orders as they would obey the word of God."
"Is that a negative...sir?"
The poge colonel tries to think of some more inspiring things to say to
me, but he has used them all up. So he says, "You can't wear that button,
Marine. It's against regulations. Remove it immediately or you will be
standing tall before the man."
Somewhere up in Heaven, where the streets are guarded by Marines, Jim
Nabors, in his Gomer Pyle uniform, sings: "From the halls of Montezuma...to
the shores of Tripoli..."
"MARINE!"
"YES, SIR!"
"WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!"
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
"The Commandant has ordered us to protect freedom by allowing the
Vietnamese to live like Americans all they want to. As long as Americans are
in Viet Nam the Vietnamese will have the right to express their political
convictions without fear of reprisal. So I will say it one more time,
Marine, take off that peace button or I will give you a tour of duty in
Portsmouth Naval Prison."
I stay at attention.
The poge colonel remains calm. "I am going to cut a new set of orders
on you, Corporal. I am personally going to demand that your commanding
officer shit-can you to the grunts. Show me your dogtags."
I dig out my dogtags and I tear off the green masking tape around them
and the poge colonel writes my name, rank, and serial number into a little
green notebook.
"Come with me, Marine," says the poge colonel, putting the little green
notebook back into his pocket. "I want to show you something."
I step over to the jeep. The poge colonel pauses for dramatic effect,
then pulls a poncho off a lump on the back seat. The lump is a Marine lance
corporal in the fetal position. In the lance corporal's neck are
punctures--many, many of them.
The poge colonel grins, bares his vampire fangs, takes step toward me.
I punch him in the chest with my wooden bayonet.
He freezes. He looks down at the wooden bayonet. He looks at the deck,
then at the sky. Suddenly his wristwatch is very interesting. "I...uh...I've
got no more time to waste on this unprofitable encounter...and get a
haircut!"
I salute. The poge colonel returns my salute. We hold the salute
awkwardly while the colonel says, "Someday, Corporal, when you're a little
older, you'll realize how naive--"
The poge colonel's voice breaks on "naive."
I grin. His eyes fall.
Both salutes cut away nicely.
"Good day, Marine," says the poge colonel. Then, armored in the dignity
awarded him by Congress, the colonel marches back to his Mighty Mite, climbs
in, and drives away with his bloodless lance corporal.
The poge colonel's Mighty Mite lays rubber--after all that talking he
doesn't even give me a ride.
"YES, SIR!" I say. "IT IS A GOOD DAY, SIR!"
The war goes on. Bombs fall. Little ones.
An hour later a deuce-and-a-half slams on its brakes.
I climb up into the cab with the driver.
During the bumpy ride back to Phu Bai the driver of the
deuce-and-a-half tells me about a mathematical system he has devised which
he will use to break the bank in Las Vegas as soon as he gets back to the
World.
As the driver talks the sun goes down and I think: Fifty-four days and
a wake-up.
I've got forty-nine days and a wake-up left in country when Captain
January hands me a piece of paper. Captain January mumbles something about
how he hopes I have good luck and then he goes to chow even though it's not
chow time.
The piece of paper orders me to report for duty as a rifleman with
Delta Company, One-Five, currently based at the Khe Sanh.
I say good-bye to Chili Vendor and Daytona Dave and Mr. Payback and I
tell hem that I'm glad to be a grunt because now I won't have to write
captions for atrocity photographs they just file away or tell any more lies
because there's nothing more the lifers can threaten me with. "What are they
going to do--send me to Viet Nam?"
Delta Six cuts Cowboy a huss and I'm assigned to Cowboy's squad as the
first fire team leader--the assistant squad leader--until I've got enough
field experience to run my own rifle squad.
There it is.
I'm a grunt.
Grunts
Behold a Marine, a mere shadow and reminiscience of humanity, a man
laid out alive and standing, buried under arms with funereal
accompaniments...
--Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Rolling thunder.
Clouds float across the white moon, clouds like great metal ships.
Black wings beating, enormous objects falling. Arc Light in the monsoon
rain; an air strike in the dark. A flight of B-52 bombers circle Khe Sanh,
sprinkling eggs of black iron. Each egg weighs two thousand pounds. Each egg
knocks a hole into the cold earth, punches a crater into the constricting
web of slit trenches that forty thousand determined little men have dug to
within a hundred yards of our wire. Black and wet, the earth heaves up like
the deck of a great ship, heaves up toward the droning death birds.
Even in the fury of aerial bombardment we sleep, shadows in the earth.
We sleep in holes we have dug with entrenching tools. The holes are little
graves and hold the rich, damp odor of the grave.
The monsoon rain is cold and heavy and is thrown all over the place by
the wind. The wind has power. The wind roars, hisses, whispers seductively.
The wind claws at the shelters we have constructed with ponchos and nylon
cord and scraps of bamboo.
Raindrops thump my poncho like pebbles falling into a broken drum. Half
asleep, my face pressed into my gear, I listen to the sounds of the horror
that is everywhere, buried just beneath the surface of the earth. In my
dreams of blood I make love to a skeleton. Bones click, the earth moves, my
testicles explode.
Shrapnel bites my shelter. I wake up. I listen to the fading drone of
the B-52's. I listen to the breathing of my squad of brothers, nightmare men
in the dark.
Outside our wire an enemy grunt is screaming at invisible airplanes
that have killed him.
I try to dream something beautiful.... My grandmother sits in a rocking
chair on her front porch shooting Viet Cong who have stepped on her roses.
She drinks the blood of a dragon from a black Coca-Cola bottle while Goring
my mother with fat white breasts nurses me and drives Germany on and on, his
words cut from the armor plate of a tank....
I sleep on steel, my face on a pillow of blood. I bayonet teddy bear
and I snore. Bad dreams are something you ate. So sleep, you mother.
The wind roars up under my shelter and rips the poncho off its bamboo
frame, snapping the lines that secured it. Rain falls on me like a wave of
icy black water.
An angry voice drifts in from beyond the wire. An enemy sergeant is
saying dirty words I don't understand. An enemy sergeant has stumbled over a
dead man in the dark....
Night patrol.
In the predawn sky a little metal star goes nova--an illumination
round.
Eating an early breakfast in the red slime of a slit trench at Khe
Sanh. Yesterday I made myself a new stove by punching air holes into an
empty C's can. Inside the stove, C-4 plastic explosive glows like a fragment
of brimstone. Ham and mothers pop and bubble in another olive-drab can while
I mix and stir with a white plastic spoon.
On the horizon, orange tracers stitch the night. Puff the Magic Dragon,
"Spooky", a C-47 flying electric Gatling gun, is pouring three hundred
rounds per minute into some gook's wet dreams.
Taste the ham and lima beans. Hot. Greasy. Smells like pig shit. With
my bayonet I lift the full can off the stove. I anchor the can in red mud. I
balance my mess cup over the flame and pour in a packet of powdered cocoa
and then half a canteen of spring water. With some slack, hot chocolate
dilutes the sour aftertaste of halazone purification tablets.
A Viet Cong rat attacks. Obviously, he intends to bring my breakfast
under the influence of Communism.
This is a rat I know personally, so I cut him some slack and do not set
him on fire with lighter fluid the way my bros and I have done with his
relatives. I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow.
In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta
One-Five look like pale lizards. My bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No
slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to their poker
cards.
From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to
assert his principles.
The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded
daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of modern war spilled across our dusty
citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins and
gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost
(patrolled at night by the ghosts of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol
horsemen of Genghis Khan)--see how the broken walls of the outpost are like
rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted
moonscape, feel the cold hard terror and the calm of it.
During the past three months the rocky terrain around Khe Sanh has been
pounded with the greatest volume of explosives in the history of war. Two
hundred million pounds of bombs and whole catalogues of other weapons have
torn and plowed the sterile red earth, have shattered boulders, have
splintered and chewed the stumps of trees, have pockmarked the deck with
craters big enough to be graves for tanks.
The flare floats down beneath a miniature parachute, swaying and
squeaking, dripping sparks and hissing, until it hits the wire. Illumination
dissolves.
In the darkness I am one with Khe Sanh--a living cell of this
place--this erupted pimple of sandbags and barbed wire on a bleak plateau
surrounded by the end of the world. In my guts I know that my body is one of
the components of gristle and muscle and bone of Khe Sanh, a small American
community pounded daily by one-hundred-and-fifty-two-millimeter artillery
pieces firing from caves eleven kilometers away on Co Roc Ridge in Laos,
pounded by fifteen hundred shells a day, pounded, pounded, pounded with
brain-numbing regularity, an anthill beneath a sledgehammer.
Today I am feeling extra fine--I'm short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up
left in country.
The Viet Cong rat crouches on a sandbag an inch from my elbow. I bend
over and put his share of ham and mothers on the toe of my boot. The rat
watches me with black bead eyes. Rats are little but they're smart. After
the rat is satisfied I can be trusted, he jumps off the sandbag and into the
slit trench. He hops up onto the toe of my boot. Eating, his cheeks are fat.
He looks so very bad; he's beautiful.
Roll call.
The squad files out through the wire. We do not joke with the drowsy
sentries who stand lines in bunkers constructed with sandbags and logs from
the jungle and sheets of galvanized tin. We ignore the hundreds of grunts
from the 26th Marine Regiment who are sprawled along the perimeter, ready to
move out on Operation Gold. Our squad is walking point for a battalion. We
ignore Claymore mines, rust-eaten Coca-Cola cans hung on the concertina wire
with pebbles in them, red aluminum triangles with MINES and MIN stenciled on
them, trenches full of garbage, catholes full of fly-sprinkled turds, and
heaps of brass from our howitzers.
This time we do not salute Sorry Charlie. Sorry Charlie is a skull,
charred black. Our gunner, Animal Mother, mounted the skull on a stake in
the kill zone. We think that it's the skull of an enemy grunt who got
napalmed outside our wire. Sorry Charlie is still wearing my old black felt
Mousketeer ears, which are getting a little moldy. I wired the ears onto
Sorry Charlie for a joke. As we hump by, I stare into the hollow eye
sockets. I wait for a white spider to emerge. The dark, clean face of death
smiles at us with his charred teeth, his inflexible ivory grin. Sorry
Charlie always smiles at us as though he knows a funny secret. For sure, he
knows more than we do.
Back on the hill, resupply choppers wop-wop down to earth like monster
grasshoppers while mortar shells rip up the steel carpet of the airstrip.
We lock and load.
Our minds sink into our feet.
On a stump inside the treeline someone has nailed a scrap of ammo crate
with crude letters that are black through the ground fog: ALL HOPE ABANDON,
YE WHO ENTER HERE. We do not laugh. Our eyes stay on the trail. We have seen
the sign a hundred times and believe it.
We meet some guys from India Three-Five humping down from their night
ambushes. Scuttlebutt is, nobody got in the shit. No VC. No NVA.
Outstanding, we all agree. Decent, we say, and we ask them if any of their
sisters put out. They offer to buy us free beer if we promise to pee down
our legs and we're to be sure and write if we need any help.
Dawn.
We come to the last two-man listening post. Cowboy waves his hand and
Alice takes the point.
Alice is a black colossus, an African wild man with a sweat rag of
green parachute silk tied around his head; no helmet. He wears a vest he has
made from the skin of a Bengal tiger he wasted one night on Hill 881. He
wears a necklace of Voodoo bones--chicken bones from New Orleans. He calls
himself "Alice" because his favorite record album is Arlo Guthrie's Alice's
Restaurant. Cowboy calls Alice "The Midnight Buccaneer" because Alice wears
a gold ring in his left ear. Animal Mother calls Alice "The Ace of Spades"
because Alice sticks poker cards between the teeth of his confirmed kills.
And I call Alice "Jungle Bunny" because it mocks Alice's truly savage
nature.
Alice has a blue canvas shopping bag slung over his shoulder. The blue
canvas shopping bag is filled with foul-smelling gook feet. Alice collects
enemy soldiers; he shoots them dead, then chops their feet off.
All clear, says Alice with a hand signal. Alice's hands are protected
by pigskin gloves. He hacks the jungle with his machete.
Cowboy waves his hand and we move along the trail, Indian-file.
Cowboy steps off the trail, jabs his gray Marine-issue glasses with his
forefinger. In the gray glasses Cowboy does not look like a killer, but like
a reporter for a high school newspaper, which he was, less than a year ago.
Humping in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an
enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster
plants. Birth and death are endless processes here, with new life feeding on
the decaying remains of the old. The black earth is cool and damp and the
oversized greenery is beaded with moisture, yet the air is thick and hot
because the triple canopy holds in the humidity. The canopy of interwoven
branches is so thick that sunlight filters through only in pale, infrequent
shafts like those in Sunday-school pictures of Jesus talking to God.
Beneath mountains like the black teeth of dragons we hump. We hump on a
woodcutter's trail, up slopes of peanut butter, over moss-blemished
boulders, into God's green furnace, into the hostile terrain of Indian
country.
Thorny underbrush claws our sweaty jungle utilities and our bandoliers
and our sixty-pound field packs and our twelve-pound Durolon flak jackets
and our three-pound camouflaged helmets and our six-and-a-half pound
fiberglass and steel automatic rifles. Limp sabers of elephant grass slice
into hands and cheeks. Creepers trip us and tear at our ankles. Pack straps
rub blisters on our shoulders and salty water wiggles in dirty worm trails
down our necks and faces. Insects eat our skin, leeches drink our blood,
snakes try to bite us, and even the monkeys throw rocks.
We hump, werewolves in the jungle, sweating 3.2 beer, ready, willing,
and able to grab wily Uncle Ho by his inscrutable balls and never let go.
But our real enemy is the jungle. God made this jungle for Marines. God has
a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see. No slack. He plays
his games; we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much omnipotent
attention we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls.
Hours pass. Many, many of them. We don't know what time it is anymore.
In the jungle there is no time. Black is green; green is black--we don't
even know if it's night or day.
Cowboy strides up and down our line of march. He reminds us to maintain
ten yards between each man. Frequently he stops to check his compass and
acetate map.
We hurt. We ignore the pain. We wait for the pain to become monotonous;
it does.
Our New Guy sweats and stumbles and looks like he could get lost
looking for a place to shit. A heat casualty for sure. The New Guy eats pink
salt tablets like a kid eating jelly beans, then gulps hot Kool-Aid from his
canteen.
Monotony. Everything samey-same--trees, vines like dead snakes, leafy
plants. The sameness leaves us unmoored.
The fuck-you lizards greet us: "Fuck you...fuck you..."
A cockatoo laughs, invisible, laughs as though he knows a funny secret.
We hump up rocky ravines and I can hear Gunny Sergeant Gerheim
bellowing at Private Leonard Pratt on Parris Island: The only way to reach
any objective is by taking one step at a time. That's all. Just one step.
One more. One more. One more
One more.
We think about things we will do after we rotate back to the World,
about silly high-school capers we pulled before we were sucked up into the
Crotch, about hunger and thirst, about R & R in Hong Kong and Australia,
about how we are all becoming Coca-Cola junkies, about picking popcorn
kernels out of our teeth at the drive-in movie with ol' Mary Jane
Rottencrotch, about the excuses we'll have to invent for not writing home,
and especially and particularly about the numbers of days left on each of
our short-timer's calendars.
We think about things that aren't important so that we won't think
about fear--about the fear of pain, of being maimed, of that half-expected
thud of an antipersonnel mine or the punch of a sniper's bullet, or about
loneliness, which is, in the long run, more dangerous, and, in some ways,
hurts more. We lock our minds onto yesterday, where the pain and loneliness
have been censored, and on tomorrow, from which pain and loneliness have
been conveniently deleted, and most of all, we locks our minds into our
feet, which have developed a life and a mind of their own.
Hold. Alice raises his right hand.
The squad stops, now, within rifle shot of the DMZ.
Cowboy flexes the fingers of his right hand as though cupping a breast.
Booby trap?
Alice shrugs. Just cool it, man.
Our survival hangs on our sniper bait's reflexes and judgment. Alice's
eyes can detect green catgut trip wires, bouncing betty prongs, tiny
plungers, loose soil, crushed plants, footprints, fragments of packaging
debris, and even the fabled punji pits. Alice's ears can lock onto unnatural
silences, the faint rattle of equipment, the thump of a mortar shell leaving
the tube, or the snap of a rifle bolt coming home. Experience and animal
instincts warn Alice when a small, badly concealed booby trap has been set
on the trail for easy detection so that we will be diverted off the trail
into a more terrible one. Alice knows that most of the casualties we take
are from booby traps and that in Viet Nam almost every booby trap is
designed so that the victim is his own executioner. He knows what the enemy
likes to do, where he likes to set ambushes, where snipers hide. Alice knows
the warning signals that the enemy leaves for his friends--the strips of
black cloth, the triangles os bamboo, the arrangements of stones.
Alice really understands the shrewd race of men who fight for survival
in this garden of darkness--hard soldiers, strange, diminutive phantoms with
iron insides, brass balls, incredible courage, and no scruples at all. They
look small, but they fight tall, and their bullets are the same size as
ours.
A lot of Marines who choose to walk point have death wishes--that's the
scuttlebutt. Some guys want to be heroes and if you walk point and are still
alive at the end of the patrol then you are a hero. Some guys who walk point
hate themselves so much that they don't care what they do and don't care
what is done to them. But Alice walks point because Alice thrives on being
out front. Sure I'm scared, he told me one night after we'd smoked about a
ton of dope, but I try not to show it. What Alice needs are those moments
when he can see into what he calls the "beyond."
Alice freezes. His right hand closes into a fist: Danger.
All of Alice's senses open up. He waits. Invisible birds scatter from
tree to tree. Alice grins, sheathes his machete, lifts his M-79 grenade
launcher to his shoulder. The "blooper" is like a toy shotgun, comically
small.
Ancient trees stand silent, a jade cathedral of mahogany columns two
hundred feet high, roots entwined, branches interwoven, with thick, scaly
vines roped around solid trunks.
Adrenaline gives us a high.
Alice shrugs, lowers his weapon, gives us his usual thumbs-up, all
clear; as if to say, I'm so cool that even my errors are correct.
Cowboy's right hand slices the air again, and we all shift our gear to
less painful positions and move out, grumbling, bitching. Our thoughts drift
back into erect-nipple wet dreams about Mary Jane Rottencrotch and the Great
Homecoming Fuck Fantasy, back into blinking black and white home movies of
events that did not happen quite the way we choose to remember them, back
into bright watercolor visions of that glorious rotation date circled in red
on all of our short-timer's calendars--different dates--but with the same
significance: Home.
Alice hesitates. His gloved hand reaches out and plucks an oversized
yellow orchid from a swirl of vines. Standing to attention, Alice inserts
the thick, juicy stem into a leather loop on his ammo vest, the skin of a
Bengal tiger. In rows of loops across the front of the vest hang two dozen
M-79 grenade rounds.
Alice's blue canvas shopping bag is slung over his shoulder. The bag is
tattooed with graffiti, autographs, obscene doodles, and a scoreboard of
stick men recording Alice's seventeen confirmed kills. On the blue canvas
shopping bag are fading black block letters: Lusthogs Delta 1/5 We Deal in
Death and Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no
evil, for I am the evil and, in crisp new letters: DON'T SHOOT--I'M SHORT
and a helmet on a pair of boots.
As he humps down the narrow trail, Alice hums, You can get anything you
want...at Alice's Restaurant...
Cowboys stops, turns around, sweeps a muddy pearl-gray Stetson off his
head.
"Break," he says.
Green Marines in the green machine, we sit beside the trail.
"I got to souvenir me an NVA belt buckle," says Donlon, our radioman.
"The silver kind with a star. Go home with something decent or the civilians
will think I was a poge, punching a typewriter. I mean, I'm
short--thirty-nine days and a wake-up."
I say, "That's not short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up. Count them."
"That ain't short," says Animal Mother. "Alice is short."
Alice brags: "Twelve days and a wake-up left in country, ladies. Count
'em. I am a short-timers, no doubt about it. Why, I'm so short that every
time I put on my socks I blindfold myself."
I grunt, "That's not short-enough, Jungle Bunny. The Doc is beaucoup
short. Nine days and a wake-up. Right, Doc? You a single-digit midget?"
Doc Jay is chewing a mouthful of canned peaches. "I got to extend
again."
Nobody says anything. Doc Jay won't be allowed to extend again. Doc Jay
has been in Viet Nam for two years, treating major wounds with minor medical
training. Doc Jay wants to save all of the wounded, even those killed in
action and buried months ago. Every night dead Marines beg him to come into
their graves. A week ago, our company commander picked up a football that
was lying on the trail. The football blew him in half. Doc Jay tried to tie
the captain back together with compress bandages. It didn't work. Doc Jay
started giggling like a kid watching cartoons.
"I'm going to extend, too!" says the New Guy as he shoves his Italian
sunglasses up onto his forehead. "Do you guys--?"
"Oh, screw yourself, New Guy," says Animal Mother, not looking up.
Mother is holding his M-60 machine gun in his lap and is massaging the black
vanadium steel with a white cloth. "You ain't been in country a week and
already you're saltier than shit. You ain't been born yet, New Guy. Wait
until you got a little T.I., candy ass, and then I may allow you to speak.
Yeah, a little fucking time in."
"Gung ho!" I say, grinning.
Animal Mother says, "Fuck you, Joker." He starts breaking down the
machine gun.
I blow Mother a kiss. Animal Mother is a swine, no doubt about it, but
The gunship is halfway back to the ants in the water when the ant on
the beach reappears and opens fire.
This time the gunship pilot brings his ship in low enough to decapitate
the ant with the chopper's skids. The gunship fires.
The ant fires.
Machine-gun bullets knock the ant over.
The gunship swings around to verify that it is a confirmed kill.
As machine-gun bullets snap into the wet sand, the ant stands up, aims
its tiny AK-47 assault rifle, and fires a thirty-round magazine on full
automatic.
The Cobra gunship explodes, splits open like a bloated green egg. The
gutted carcass of aluminum and plexiglass bounces along, suspended in the
air, burning, trailing black smoke. And then it falls.
The flaming chopper hits the river and the flowing water sucks it down.
The ant does not move. The ant fires another magazine on full
automatic. The ant is shooting at the sky.
Tired of firing into floating corpses, the remaining two gunships
attack.
The ant walks off the beach.
The gunships hit the beach and sand dunes with every weapon they've
got. They circle and circle and circle like predatory birds. Then, out of
ammunition and out of fuel, they buzz straight into the horizon and vanish.
Delta Company applauds and cheers and whistles. "Get some! Number one!
Out-fucking-standing! Payback is a motherfucker!"
Alice says, "That guy was a grunt."
While we wait for the gunboats to come and take us back across the
River of Perfumes we talk about how the NVA grunt was one hell of a hard
individual and about how it would be okay if he came to America and married
all our sisters and about how we all hope that he will live to be a hundred
years old because the world will be diminished when he's gone.
The next morning, Rafter Man and I get the map coordinates of a mass
grave from some green ghouls and we hump over to the site to get Captain
January his atrocity photographs.
The mass grave smells really bad--the odor of blood, the stink of
worms, decayed human beings. The Arvin snuffies doing the digging in a
school yard have all tied olive-drab skivvy shirts around their faces, but
casualties due to uncontrollable puking are heavy.
We see corpses of Vietnamese civilians who have been buried alive,
faces frozen in mid-scream, hands like claws, the fingernails bloody and
caked with damp earth. All of the dead people are grinning that hideous,
joyless grin of those who have heard the joke, of those who have seen the
terrible secrets of the earth. There's even the corpse of a dog which Victor
Charlie could not separate from its master.
There are no corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. However,
the green ghouls assure us that they have seen such corpses elsewhere. So I
borrow some demolition wire from the Arvin snuffies and, crushing the stiff
bodies with my knee until dry bones crack, I bind up a family, assembled at
random from the multitude--a man, his wife, a little boy, a little girl,
and, of course, their dog. As a final touch, I wire the dog's feet together.
Noon at the MAC-V compound. We say good-bye to Cowboy and to the
Lusthog Squad.
Cowboy has found a stray puppy and is carrying the bony little animal
inside his shirt. Cowboy says to me, "Keep your ass down, bro. Scuttlebutt
is, the Lusthog Squad is headed up to Khe Sanh, a very hairy area. But no
sweat; we can hack it. And maybe they got some horses up there. So if you
ever feel hard enough to be a real Marine, a grunt, bop up to see us."
I pet Cowboy's puppy. "Never happen. But you take care, you piece of
shit. We've got a date with your sister I don't care to miss."
Rafter Man says good-bye to Alice and to the other guys in Cowboy's
squad. He shakes hands with Cowboy and pets Cowboy's puppy. In my best John
Wayne voice I say, "See you later, Mother."
Animal Mother says, "Not if I see you first."
Rafter Man and I ditty-bop down Route One, south, toward Phu Bai. We
hump in crushing heat for hours, looking for a ride. But the sun is without
mercy and there are no convoys in sight.
We sit in the shade by the road. "It's hot," I say. "It's very hot.
Wish that old mamasan was here. I'd souvenir beaucoup money for one Coke..."
Rafter Man stands up. "No sweat. I can find her..." Rafter Man
ditty-bops into the road.
I start to say something about how it might be a good idea for us to
stay together. There are still plenty of NVA stragglers in the area.
"Rafter..." But then I remember that Rafter Man has got his first confirmed
kill. Rafter Man can take care of himself.
The deck trembles. A tank? I look up, but I can't see anything on the
road. Yet nothing on earth sounds as big as a tank, nothing produces that
terrible rumble of metal like a tank. It shakes my bones. I jump up, weapon
ready. I look up and down the road. Nothing. But all around me is the clamor
of rolling iron and the odor of diesel fuel.
Rafter Man is walking across the road. He does not hear the invisible
tank. He does not feel the mechanical earthquake.
I double-time after him. "Rafter!"
Rafter Man turns around. He grins. And then we both see it. The tank is
an object of heavy metal forged from a cold shadow, a ghost with substance.
The black mechanical phantom comes for us, dark ectoplasm rolling in the
sun. The blond tank commander stands in the turret hatch, staring straight
ahead and into the beyond, laughing.
Rafter Man turns around.
I say, "Don't move."
But Rafter looks at me, panic on his face.
I grab his shoulder.
Rafter Man pulls away and runs.
The tank is bearing down on me. I don't move.
The tank swerves, misses me, roars past like a big iron dragon. The
tank runs over Rafter Man and crushes him beneath its steel treads. And then
it's gone.
Rafter Man likes on his back in the dirt, a crushed dog spilling out of
its skin. Rafter Man looks at me the way he looked at me that day at the
Freedom Hill PX on Hill 327 in Da Nang. His eyes are begging me for an
explanation.
Rafter Man has been cut in half just below his new NVA rifle belt. His
intestines are pink rope all over the deck. He is trying to pull himself
back in, but it doesn't work. His guts are wet and slippery and he can't
hold them in. He tries to reinsert his spilling guts back into his severed
torso. He tries very hard to keep the dirt off of his intestines as he
works.
Rafter Man stops trying to save himself and, instead, just stares at me
with an expression that might be found on the face of a person who wakes up
with a dead bird in his mouth.
"Sarge..."
"Don't call me 'Sarge,'" I say.
I kneel down and pick up Rafter's black-body Nikon. I say, "I'll tell
Mr. Payback about your belt and about your SKS..." I want so much to cry,
but I can't cry--I'm too tough.
I stop talking to Rafter Man because Rafter Man is dead. Talking to
dead people is not a healthy habit for a living person to cultivate and
lately I have been talking to dead people quite a lot. I guess I've been
talking to dead people ever since I made my first confirmed kill. After my
first confirmed kill, talking to corpses began to make more sense than
talking to people who had not yet been wasted.
In Viet Nam you see corpses almost every day. At first you try to
ignore them. You don't want people to think you're curious. Nobody wants to
admit that corpses are not old hat to them; nobody wants to be a New Guy. So
you see lumps of dirty rags. And after a while you begin to notice that the
lumps of dirty rags have arms and legs and heads. And faces.
The first time I saw a corpse, back when I was a New Guy, I wanted to
vomit, just like in the movies. The corpse was an NVA grunt who died in a
great orange ball of jellied gasoline near Con Thien. The napalm left a
crumbled heap of ashes in the fetal position. His mouth was open. His
charred fingers were covering his eyes.
The second time I really looked at a corpse I was embarrassed. The
corpse was an old Vietnamese woman with teeth which had turned black after a
lifetime of chewing betel nuts. The woman had been hit by something bigger
than small-arms fire. She was killed in a crossfire between ROK Marines and
NVA grunts in Hoi An. She seemed so exposed in death, so vulnerable.
My third corpse was a decapitated Marine. I stumbled over him on an
operation in the A Shau valley. My reaction was curiosity. I wondered what
the rounds had felt like as they entered his body, what his last thought
was, what his last sound was at the moment of impact. I marveled at the
ultimate power of death. A big strong American boy, so vibrant and
red-blooded, had become within minutes a yellow lump of inflexible meat. And
I understood that my own weapon could do this dark magic thing to any human
being. With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any enemy with
just the slightest pressure of one finger. And, knowing that, I was less
afraid.
The fourth corpse is the last one I remember. After that they've
blurred together, a mountain of faceless dead. But I think that the fourth
corpse was the old papasan in the conical white hat I saw on Route One. The
old man had been run over by a six-by as he squatted in the road taking a
shit. All I remember is that when I marched by, flies exploded off the old
man like pieces of shrapnel.
I got my first confirmed kill with India Three-Five.
I was writing a feature article about how the grunts at the Rockpile on
Route Nine had to sweep the road for mines every morning before any traffic
could use the road. There was a fat gunny who insisted on walking point with
a metal detector. The fat gunny wanted to protect his people. He believed
that fate killed the careless. He stepped on an antitank mine. A man is not
supposed to be heavy enough to detonate an antitank mine, but the gunny was
pretty fat.
The earth opened up and hell came out with a roar that jarred my bones.
The fat gunny was launched into the clean blue sky, green and round and
loose-jointed like a broken doll. I watched the fat gunny float up to heaven
and then a wall of heat slammed into me and I collided with the deck.
The fat gunny floated back to earth.
Although shrapnel had stung my face and peppered my flak jacket, I was
not afraid. I was very calm. From the moment the mine detonated I knew I was
a dead man, and there was nothing I could do.
Behind me a man was cursing. The man was a Navy corpsman. The
corpsman's right hand had been split open and he was holding his fingers
together with his good hand and cursing and yelling for a corpsman.
Then I understood that the "shrapnel" I'd felt had only been shattered
gravel.
Grunts from the security squad were crawling into the bushes, turning
outboard, weapons ready.
Still confused about why I was still alive I got to my feet and
double-timed to the little pit that had been torn into the road by the
explosion.
Two grunts were double-timing across a meadow toward a treeline. I
followed them, my finger on the trigger of my M-16, eager to pour invisible
darts of destruction into the shadows.
The two grunts and I ran until we passed through the treeline and
emerged on the edge of a vast rice paddy. There the fat gunny was floating
on his back in the shallow water, surrounded by dark pieces of
do-it-yourself fertilizer.
The grunts spread a poncho under him while I stood security. Both of
the gunny's legs had been torn off at the pelvis. I saw one of his fat legs
floating nearby so I picked it up out of the water and threw it in on top of
him.
We all took hold of the poncho and started carrying the heavy load back
to the road. I was breathing hard, and the black anger was pounding inside
my chest. I was watching the trees, hoping I'd see movement.
And then out of nowhere a man appeared, a tiny, ancient farmer who was
at the same time ridiculous and dignified. The ancient farmer had a hoe on
his shoulder and was wearing the obligatory conical white hat. His chest was
bony and he looked so old. His sturdy legs were scarred. The ancient farmer
didn't speak to us. He just stood there beside the trail with rice shoots in
his hand, calm, his mind rehearsing the hard work he had to do that day.
The ancient farmer smiled. He saw the frantic children with their fat
burden of death and he felt sorry for us. So he smiled to show that he
understood what we were going through. Then my M-16 was vibrating and
invisible metal missiles were snapping through the ancient farmer's body as
though he were a bag of dry sticks.
The ancient farmer looked at me. As he fell forward into the dark water
his face was tranquil and I could see that he understood.
After my first confirmed kill I began to understand that it was not
necessary to understand. What you do, you become. The insights of one moment
are blotted out by the events of the next. And no amount of insight could
ever alter the cold, black fact of what I had done. I was caught up in a
constricting web of darkness, and, like the ancient farmer, I was suddenly
very calm, just as I had been calm when the mine detonated, because there
was nothing I could do. I was defining myself with bullets; blood had
blemished my Yankee Doodle dream that everything would have a happy ending,
and that I, when the war was over, would return to hometown America in a
white silk uniform, a rainbow of campaign ribbons across my chest, brave
beyond belief, the military Jesus.
I think about my first kill for a long time. At twilight a corpsman
appears. I explain to him that Marines never abandon their dead or wounded.
The corpsman looks at each of Rafter Man's pupils several times.
"What?"
I shrug. I say, "Payback is a motherfucker."
"What?" The corpsman is confused. The corpsman is obviously a New Guy.
"Tanks for the memories..." I say, because I do not know how to tell
him how I feel. You're a machine gunner who has come to the end of his last
belt. You're waiting, staring out through the barbed wire at the little men
who are assaulting your position. You see their tiny toy-soldier bayonets
and their determined, eyeless faces, but you're a machine gunner who has
come to the end of his last belt and there's nothing you can do. The little
men are going to grow and grow and grow--illuminated by the fluid, ghostly
fire of a star flare--and then they're going to run up over you and cut you
up with knives. You see this. You know this. But you're a machine gunner who
has come to the end of his last belt and there's nothing you can do. In
their distant fury the little men are your brothers and you love them more
than you love your friends. So you wait for the little men to come and you
know you'll be waiting for them when they come because you no longer have
anywhere else to go...
The corpsman is confused. He does not understand why I'm smiling. "Are
you okay, Marine?" Yes, he is a New Guy for sure.
I ditty-bop down the road. The corpsman calls after me. I ignore him.
A mile away from the place of fear I stick out my thumb.
I'm dirty, unshaven, and dead tired.
A Mighty Mite slams on its brakes. "MARINE!"
I turn, thinking I've got some slack, thinking I've got a ride.
A poge colonel pounces out of the jeep, marches up to face me.
"MARINE!"
I think: Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me? "Aye-aye, sir."
"Corporal, don't you know how to execute a hand salute?"
"Yes, sir." I salute. I hold the salute until the poge colonel snaps
his hand to his starched barracks cover and I hold the salute for an extra
couple of second before cutting it away sharply. Now he poge colonel has
been identified as an officer to any enemy snipers in the area.
"Corporal, don't you know how to stand to attention?"
Right away I start wishing I was back in the shit. In battles there are
no police, only people who want to shoot you. In battles there are no poges.
Poges try to kill you on the inside. Poges leave your body intact because
your muscles are all they want from you anyway.
I stand to attention, wobbling slightly beneath the sixty pounds of
gear I'm humping.
The poge colonel has a classic granite jaw. I'm sure that the Marine
Corps must have a strict examination at the officers' candidate school at
Quantico designed to eliminate all officer candidates who lack the granite
jaw.
His jungle utilities are razor-creased, starched to the consistency of
green armor. He executes a flawless Short Pause, a favorite technique of
leaders of men, designed to inflict its victim with fatal insecurity. Having
no desire to damage the colonel's self-confidence, I respond with my best
Parris Island rendition of I-am-only-an-enlisted-person-I-try-to-be-humble.
"Marine..." The colonel stands ramrod straight. This stance is the Air
of Command, intended to intimidate me, despite the fact that I'm a foot
taller and outweigh him by fifty pounds. The colonel investigates the
underside of my chin. "Marine..." He likes that word. "What is that on your
body armor, Marine?"
"Sir?"
The poge colonel stands on tiptoe. For a moment I'm afraid he's going
to bite me in the neck. But he only wants to breathe on me. His smile is
cold. His skin is too white. "Marine..."
"Sir?"
"I asked you a question."
"You mean this peace button, sir?"
"What is it?"
"A peace symbol, sir..."
I wait patiently while the colonel tries to remember the "Maintaining
Interpersonal Relationships with Subordinate Personnel" chapter of his OCS
textbook.
The poge colonel continues to breathe all over my face. His breath
smells of mint. Marine Corps officers are not allowed to have bad breath,
body odor, acne pimples, nor holes in their underwear. Marine Corps officers
are not allowed to have anything that has not been issued to them.
The colonel jabs my button with a forefinger, gives me a fairly decent
Polished Glare. His blue eyes sparkle. "That's right, son, act innocent. But
I know what that button means."
"Yes, sir!"
"It's a ban-the-bomb propaganda button. Admit it!"
"No, sir." I'm in real pain. The man who invented standing at attention
obviously never humped any gear.
"Then what does it mean?"
"It's just a symbol for peace, sir."
"Oh, yeah?" He breathes faster, up close now, as though he can smell
lies.
"Yes, Colonel, it's just--"
"MARINE!"
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
"WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!"
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
The poge colonel moves around me, stalks me. "Do you call yourself a
Marine?"
"Well..."
"WHAT?"
"Crossed fingers, king's-X. "Yes, sir."
"Now seriously, son..." The colonel begins an excellent Fatherly
Approach. "Just tell me who gave you that button. You can level with me. You
can trust me. I only want to help you." The poge colonel smiles.
The colonel's smile is funny so I smile, too.
"Where did you get that button, Marine?" The colonel looks hurt. "Don't
you love your country, son?"
"Well..."
"Do you believe that the United States should allow the Vietnamese to
invade Viet Nam just because they live here?" The poge colonel is struggling
to regain his composure. "Do you?"
My shoulders are about to fall off. My legs are falling asleep. "No,
sir. We should bomb them back to the Stone Age...sir."
"Confess, Corporal, confess that you want peace."
I give him a Short Pause. "Doesn't the colonel want peace...sir?"
The colonel hesitates. "Son, we've all got to keep our heads until this
peace craze blows over. All I have ever asked of my boys is that they obey
my orders as they would obey the word of God."
"Is that a negative...sir?"
The poge colonel tries to think of some more inspiring things to say to
me, but he has used them all up. So he says, "You can't wear that button,
Marine. It's against regulations. Remove it immediately or you will be
standing tall before the man."
Somewhere up in Heaven, where the streets are guarded by Marines, Jim
Nabors, in his Gomer Pyle uniform, sings: "From the halls of Montezuma...to
the shores of Tripoli..."
"MARINE!"
"YES, SIR!"
"WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!"
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
"The Commandant has ordered us to protect freedom by allowing the
Vietnamese to live like Americans all they want to. As long as Americans are
in Viet Nam the Vietnamese will have the right to express their political
convictions without fear of reprisal. So I will say it one more time,
Marine, take off that peace button or I will give you a tour of duty in
Portsmouth Naval Prison."
I stay at attention.
The poge colonel remains calm. "I am going to cut a new set of orders
on you, Corporal. I am personally going to demand that your commanding
officer shit-can you to the grunts. Show me your dogtags."
I dig out my dogtags and I tear off the green masking tape around them
and the poge colonel writes my name, rank, and serial number into a little
green notebook.
"Come with me, Marine," says the poge colonel, putting the little green
notebook back into his pocket. "I want to show you something."
I step over to the jeep. The poge colonel pauses for dramatic effect,
then pulls a poncho off a lump on the back seat. The lump is a Marine lance
corporal in the fetal position. In the lance corporal's neck are
punctures--many, many of them.
The poge colonel grins, bares his vampire fangs, takes step toward me.
I punch him in the chest with my wooden bayonet.
He freezes. He looks down at the wooden bayonet. He looks at the deck,
then at the sky. Suddenly his wristwatch is very interesting. "I...uh...I've
got no more time to waste on this unprofitable encounter...and get a
haircut!"
I salute. The poge colonel returns my salute. We hold the salute
awkwardly while the colonel says, "Someday, Corporal, when you're a little
older, you'll realize how naive--"
The poge colonel's voice breaks on "naive."
I grin. His eyes fall.
Both salutes cut away nicely.
"Good day, Marine," says the poge colonel. Then, armored in the dignity
awarded him by Congress, the colonel marches back to his Mighty Mite, climbs
in, and drives away with his bloodless lance corporal.
The poge colonel's Mighty Mite lays rubber--after all that talking he
doesn't even give me a ride.
"YES, SIR!" I say. "IT IS A GOOD DAY, SIR!"
The war goes on. Bombs fall. Little ones.
An hour later a deuce-and-a-half slams on its brakes.
I climb up into the cab with the driver.
During the bumpy ride back to Phu Bai the driver of the
deuce-and-a-half tells me about a mathematical system he has devised which
he will use to break the bank in Las Vegas as soon as he gets back to the
World.
As the driver talks the sun goes down and I think: Fifty-four days and
a wake-up.
I've got forty-nine days and a wake-up left in country when Captain
January hands me a piece of paper. Captain January mumbles something about
how he hopes I have good luck and then he goes to chow even though it's not
chow time.
The piece of paper orders me to report for duty as a rifleman with
Delta Company, One-Five, currently based at the Khe Sanh.
I say good-bye to Chili Vendor and Daytona Dave and Mr. Payback and I
tell hem that I'm glad to be a grunt because now I won't have to write
captions for atrocity photographs they just file away or tell any more lies
because there's nothing more the lifers can threaten me with. "What are they
going to do--send me to Viet Nam?"
Delta Six cuts Cowboy a huss and I'm assigned to Cowboy's squad as the
first fire team leader--the assistant squad leader--until I've got enough
field experience to run my own rifle squad.
There it is.
I'm a grunt.
Grunts
Behold a Marine, a mere shadow and reminiscience of humanity, a man
laid out alive and standing, buried under arms with funereal
accompaniments...
--Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Rolling thunder.
Clouds float across the white moon, clouds like great metal ships.
Black wings beating, enormous objects falling. Arc Light in the monsoon
rain; an air strike in the dark. A flight of B-52 bombers circle Khe Sanh,
sprinkling eggs of black iron. Each egg weighs two thousand pounds. Each egg
knocks a hole into the cold earth, punches a crater into the constricting
web of slit trenches that forty thousand determined little men have dug to
within a hundred yards of our wire. Black and wet, the earth heaves up like
the deck of a great ship, heaves up toward the droning death birds.
Even in the fury of aerial bombardment we sleep, shadows in the earth.
We sleep in holes we have dug with entrenching tools. The holes are little
graves and hold the rich, damp odor of the grave.
The monsoon rain is cold and heavy and is thrown all over the place by
the wind. The wind has power. The wind roars, hisses, whispers seductively.
The wind claws at the shelters we have constructed with ponchos and nylon
cord and scraps of bamboo.
Raindrops thump my poncho like pebbles falling into a broken drum. Half
asleep, my face pressed into my gear, I listen to the sounds of the horror
that is everywhere, buried just beneath the surface of the earth. In my
dreams of blood I make love to a skeleton. Bones click, the earth moves, my
testicles explode.
Shrapnel bites my shelter. I wake up. I listen to the fading drone of
the B-52's. I listen to the breathing of my squad of brothers, nightmare men
in the dark.
Outside our wire an enemy grunt is screaming at invisible airplanes
that have killed him.
I try to dream something beautiful.... My grandmother sits in a rocking
chair on her front porch shooting Viet Cong who have stepped on her roses.
She drinks the blood of a dragon from a black Coca-Cola bottle while Goring
my mother with fat white breasts nurses me and drives Germany on and on, his
words cut from the armor plate of a tank....
I sleep on steel, my face on a pillow of blood. I bayonet teddy bear
and I snore. Bad dreams are something you ate. So sleep, you mother.
The wind roars up under my shelter and rips the poncho off its bamboo
frame, snapping the lines that secured it. Rain falls on me like a wave of
icy black water.
An angry voice drifts in from beyond the wire. An enemy sergeant is
saying dirty words I don't understand. An enemy sergeant has stumbled over a
dead man in the dark....
Night patrol.
In the predawn sky a little metal star goes nova--an illumination
round.
Eating an early breakfast in the red slime of a slit trench at Khe
Sanh. Yesterday I made myself a new stove by punching air holes into an
empty C's can. Inside the stove, C-4 plastic explosive glows like a fragment
of brimstone. Ham and mothers pop and bubble in another olive-drab can while
I mix and stir with a white plastic spoon.
On the horizon, orange tracers stitch the night. Puff the Magic Dragon,
"Spooky", a C-47 flying electric Gatling gun, is pouring three hundred
rounds per minute into some gook's wet dreams.
Taste the ham and lima beans. Hot. Greasy. Smells like pig shit. With
my bayonet I lift the full can off the stove. I anchor the can in red mud. I
balance my mess cup over the flame and pour in a packet of powdered cocoa
and then half a canteen of spring water. With some slack, hot chocolate
dilutes the sour aftertaste of halazone purification tablets.
A Viet Cong rat attacks. Obviously, he intends to bring my breakfast
under the influence of Communism.
This is a rat I know personally, so I cut him some slack and do not set
him on fire with lighter fluid the way my bros and I have done with his
relatives. I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow.
In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta
One-Five look like pale lizards. My bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No
slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to their poker
cards.
From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to
assert his principles.
The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded
daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of modern war spilled across our dusty
citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins and
gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost
(patrolled at night by the ghosts of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol
horsemen of Genghis Khan)--see how the broken walls of the outpost are like
rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted
moonscape, feel the cold hard terror and the calm of it.
During the past three months the rocky terrain around Khe Sanh has been
pounded with the greatest volume of explosives in the history of war. Two
hundred million pounds of bombs and whole catalogues of other weapons have
torn and plowed the sterile red earth, have shattered boulders, have
splintered and chewed the stumps of trees, have pockmarked the deck with
craters big enough to be graves for tanks.
The flare floats down beneath a miniature parachute, swaying and
squeaking, dripping sparks and hissing, until it hits the wire. Illumination
dissolves.
In the darkness I am one with Khe Sanh--a living cell of this
place--this erupted pimple of sandbags and barbed wire on a bleak plateau
surrounded by the end of the world. In my guts I know that my body is one of
the components of gristle and muscle and bone of Khe Sanh, a small American
community pounded daily by one-hundred-and-fifty-two-millimeter artillery
pieces firing from caves eleven kilometers away on Co Roc Ridge in Laos,
pounded by fifteen hundred shells a day, pounded, pounded, pounded with
brain-numbing regularity, an anthill beneath a sledgehammer.
Today I am feeling extra fine--I'm short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up
left in country.
The Viet Cong rat crouches on a sandbag an inch from my elbow. I bend
over and put his share of ham and mothers on the toe of my boot. The rat
watches me with black bead eyes. Rats are little but they're smart. After
the rat is satisfied I can be trusted, he jumps off the sandbag and into the
slit trench. He hops up onto the toe of my boot. Eating, his cheeks are fat.
He looks so very bad; he's beautiful.
Roll call.
The squad files out through the wire. We do not joke with the drowsy
sentries who stand lines in bunkers constructed with sandbags and logs from
the jungle and sheets of galvanized tin. We ignore the hundreds of grunts
from the 26th Marine Regiment who are sprawled along the perimeter, ready to
move out on Operation Gold. Our squad is walking point for a battalion. We
ignore Claymore mines, rust-eaten Coca-Cola cans hung on the concertina wire
with pebbles in them, red aluminum triangles with MINES and MIN stenciled on
them, trenches full of garbage, catholes full of fly-sprinkled turds, and
heaps of brass from our howitzers.
This time we do not salute Sorry Charlie. Sorry Charlie is a skull,
charred black. Our gunner, Animal Mother, mounted the skull on a stake in
the kill zone. We think that it's the skull of an enemy grunt who got
napalmed outside our wire. Sorry Charlie is still wearing my old black felt
Mousketeer ears, which are getting a little moldy. I wired the ears onto
Sorry Charlie for a joke. As we hump by, I stare into the hollow eye
sockets. I wait for a white spider to emerge. The dark, clean face of death
smiles at us with his charred teeth, his inflexible ivory grin. Sorry
Charlie always smiles at us as though he knows a funny secret. For sure, he
knows more than we do.
Back on the hill, resupply choppers wop-wop down to earth like monster
grasshoppers while mortar shells rip up the steel carpet of the airstrip.
We lock and load.
Our minds sink into our feet.
On a stump inside the treeline someone has nailed a scrap of ammo crate
with crude letters that are black through the ground fog: ALL HOPE ABANDON,
YE WHO ENTER HERE. We do not laugh. Our eyes stay on the trail. We have seen
the sign a hundred times and believe it.
We meet some guys from India Three-Five humping down from their night
ambushes. Scuttlebutt is, nobody got in the shit. No VC. No NVA.
Outstanding, we all agree. Decent, we say, and we ask them if any of their
sisters put out. They offer to buy us free beer if we promise to pee down
our legs and we're to be sure and write if we need any help.
Dawn.
We come to the last two-man listening post. Cowboy waves his hand and
Alice takes the point.
Alice is a black colossus, an African wild man with a sweat rag of
green parachute silk tied around his head; no helmet. He wears a vest he has
made from the skin of a Bengal tiger he wasted one night on Hill 881. He
wears a necklace of Voodoo bones--chicken bones from New Orleans. He calls
himself "Alice" because his favorite record album is Arlo Guthrie's Alice's
Restaurant. Cowboy calls Alice "The Midnight Buccaneer" because Alice wears
a gold ring in his left ear. Animal Mother calls Alice "The Ace of Spades"
because Alice sticks poker cards between the teeth of his confirmed kills.
And I call Alice "Jungle Bunny" because it mocks Alice's truly savage
nature.
Alice has a blue canvas shopping bag slung over his shoulder. The blue
canvas shopping bag is filled with foul-smelling gook feet. Alice collects
enemy soldiers; he shoots them dead, then chops their feet off.
All clear, says Alice with a hand signal. Alice's hands are protected
by pigskin gloves. He hacks the jungle with his machete.
Cowboy waves his hand and we move along the trail, Indian-file.
Cowboy steps off the trail, jabs his gray Marine-issue glasses with his
forefinger. In the gray glasses Cowboy does not look like a killer, but like
a reporter for a high school newspaper, which he was, less than a year ago.
Humping in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an
enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster
plants. Birth and death are endless processes here, with new life feeding on
the decaying remains of the old. The black earth is cool and damp and the
oversized greenery is beaded with moisture, yet the air is thick and hot
because the triple canopy holds in the humidity. The canopy of interwoven
branches is so thick that sunlight filters through only in pale, infrequent
shafts like those in Sunday-school pictures of Jesus talking to God.
Beneath mountains like the black teeth of dragons we hump. We hump on a
woodcutter's trail, up slopes of peanut butter, over moss-blemished
boulders, into God's green furnace, into the hostile terrain of Indian
country.
Thorny underbrush claws our sweaty jungle utilities and our bandoliers
and our sixty-pound field packs and our twelve-pound Durolon flak jackets
and our three-pound camouflaged helmets and our six-and-a-half pound
fiberglass and steel automatic rifles. Limp sabers of elephant grass slice
into hands and cheeks. Creepers trip us and tear at our ankles. Pack straps
rub blisters on our shoulders and salty water wiggles in dirty worm trails
down our necks and faces. Insects eat our skin, leeches drink our blood,
snakes try to bite us, and even the monkeys throw rocks.
We hump, werewolves in the jungle, sweating 3.2 beer, ready, willing,
and able to grab wily Uncle Ho by his inscrutable balls and never let go.
But our real enemy is the jungle. God made this jungle for Marines. God has
a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see. No slack. He plays
his games; we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much omnipotent
attention we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls.
Hours pass. Many, many of them. We don't know what time it is anymore.
In the jungle there is no time. Black is green; green is black--we don't
even know if it's night or day.
Cowboy strides up and down our line of march. He reminds us to maintain
ten yards between each man. Frequently he stops to check his compass and
acetate map.
We hurt. We ignore the pain. We wait for the pain to become monotonous;
it does.
Our New Guy sweats and stumbles and looks like he could get lost
looking for a place to shit. A heat casualty for sure. The New Guy eats pink
salt tablets like a kid eating jelly beans, then gulps hot Kool-Aid from his
canteen.
Monotony. Everything samey-same--trees, vines like dead snakes, leafy
plants. The sameness leaves us unmoored.
The fuck-you lizards greet us: "Fuck you...fuck you..."
A cockatoo laughs, invisible, laughs as though he knows a funny secret.
We hump up rocky ravines and I can hear Gunny Sergeant Gerheim
bellowing at Private Leonard Pratt on Parris Island: The only way to reach
any objective is by taking one step at a time. That's all. Just one step.
One more. One more. One more
One more.
We think about things we will do after we rotate back to the World,
about silly high-school capers we pulled before we were sucked up into the
Crotch, about hunger and thirst, about R & R in Hong Kong and Australia,
about how we are all becoming Coca-Cola junkies, about picking popcorn
kernels out of our teeth at the drive-in movie with ol' Mary Jane
Rottencrotch, about the excuses we'll have to invent for not writing home,
and especially and particularly about the numbers of days left on each of
our short-timer's calendars.
We think about things that aren't important so that we won't think
about fear--about the fear of pain, of being maimed, of that half-expected
thud of an antipersonnel mine or the punch of a sniper's bullet, or about
loneliness, which is, in the long run, more dangerous, and, in some ways,
hurts more. We lock our minds onto yesterday, where the pain and loneliness
have been censored, and on tomorrow, from which pain and loneliness have
been conveniently deleted, and most of all, we locks our minds into our
feet, which have developed a life and a mind of their own.
Hold. Alice raises his right hand.
The squad stops, now, within rifle shot of the DMZ.
Cowboy flexes the fingers of his right hand as though cupping a breast.
Booby trap?
Alice shrugs. Just cool it, man.
Our survival hangs on our sniper bait's reflexes and judgment. Alice's
eyes can detect green catgut trip wires, bouncing betty prongs, tiny
plungers, loose soil, crushed plants, footprints, fragments of packaging
debris, and even the fabled punji pits. Alice's ears can lock onto unnatural
silences, the faint rattle of equipment, the thump of a mortar shell leaving
the tube, or the snap of a rifle bolt coming home. Experience and animal
instincts warn Alice when a small, badly concealed booby trap has been set
on the trail for easy detection so that we will be diverted off the trail
into a more terrible one. Alice knows that most of the casualties we take
are from booby traps and that in Viet Nam almost every booby trap is
designed so that the victim is his own executioner. He knows what the enemy
likes to do, where he likes to set ambushes, where snipers hide. Alice knows
the warning signals that the enemy leaves for his friends--the strips of
black cloth, the triangles os bamboo, the arrangements of stones.
Alice really understands the shrewd race of men who fight for survival
in this garden of darkness--hard soldiers, strange, diminutive phantoms with
iron insides, brass balls, incredible courage, and no scruples at all. They
look small, but they fight tall, and their bullets are the same size as
ours.
A lot of Marines who choose to walk point have death wishes--that's the
scuttlebutt. Some guys want to be heroes and if you walk point and are still
alive at the end of the patrol then you are a hero. Some guys who walk point
hate themselves so much that they don't care what they do and don't care
what is done to them. But Alice walks point because Alice thrives on being
out front. Sure I'm scared, he told me one night after we'd smoked about a
ton of dope, but I try not to show it. What Alice needs are those moments
when he can see into what he calls the "beyond."
Alice freezes. His right hand closes into a fist: Danger.
All of Alice's senses open up. He waits. Invisible birds scatter from
tree to tree. Alice grins, sheathes his machete, lifts his M-79 grenade
launcher to his shoulder. The "blooper" is like a toy shotgun, comically
small.
Ancient trees stand silent, a jade cathedral of mahogany columns two
hundred feet high, roots entwined, branches interwoven, with thick, scaly
vines roped around solid trunks.
Adrenaline gives us a high.
Alice shrugs, lowers his weapon, gives us his usual thumbs-up, all
clear; as if to say, I'm so cool that even my errors are correct.
Cowboy's right hand slices the air again, and we all shift our gear to
less painful positions and move out, grumbling, bitching. Our thoughts drift
back into erect-nipple wet dreams about Mary Jane Rottencrotch and the Great
Homecoming Fuck Fantasy, back into blinking black and white home movies of
events that did not happen quite the way we choose to remember them, back
into bright watercolor visions of that glorious rotation date circled in red
on all of our short-timer's calendars--different dates--but with the same
significance: Home.
Alice hesitates. His gloved hand reaches out and plucks an oversized
yellow orchid from a swirl of vines. Standing to attention, Alice inserts
the thick, juicy stem into a leather loop on his ammo vest, the skin of a
Bengal tiger. In rows of loops across the front of the vest hang two dozen
M-79 grenade rounds.
Alice's blue canvas shopping bag is slung over his shoulder. The bag is
tattooed with graffiti, autographs, obscene doodles, and a scoreboard of
stick men recording Alice's seventeen confirmed kills. On the blue canvas
shopping bag are fading black block letters: Lusthogs Delta 1/5 We Deal in
Death and Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no
evil, for I am the evil and, in crisp new letters: DON'T SHOOT--I'M SHORT
and a helmet on a pair of boots.
As he humps down the narrow trail, Alice hums, You can get anything you
want...at Alice's Restaurant...
Cowboys stops, turns around, sweeps a muddy pearl-gray Stetson off his
head.
"Break," he says.
Green Marines in the green machine, we sit beside the trail.
"I got to souvenir me an NVA belt buckle," says Donlon, our radioman.
"The silver kind with a star. Go home with something decent or the civilians
will think I was a poge, punching a typewriter. I mean, I'm
short--thirty-nine days and a wake-up."
I say, "That's not short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up. Count them."
"That ain't short," says Animal Mother. "Alice is short."
Alice brags: "Twelve days and a wake-up left in country, ladies. Count
'em. I am a short-timers, no doubt about it. Why, I'm so short that every
time I put on my socks I blindfold myself."
I grunt, "That's not short-enough, Jungle Bunny. The Doc is beaucoup
short. Nine days and a wake-up. Right, Doc? You a single-digit midget?"
Doc Jay is chewing a mouthful of canned peaches. "I got to extend
again."
Nobody says anything. Doc Jay won't be allowed to extend again. Doc Jay
has been in Viet Nam for two years, treating major wounds with minor medical
training. Doc Jay wants to save all of the wounded, even those killed in
action and buried months ago. Every night dead Marines beg him to come into
their graves. A week ago, our company commander picked up a football that
was lying on the trail. The football blew him in half. Doc Jay tried to tie
the captain back together with compress bandages. It didn't work. Doc Jay
started giggling like a kid watching cartoons.
"I'm going to extend, too!" says the New Guy as he shoves his Italian
sunglasses up onto his forehead. "Do you guys--?"
"Oh, screw yourself, New Guy," says Animal Mother, not looking up.
Mother is holding his M-60 machine gun in his lap and is massaging the black
vanadium steel with a white cloth. "You ain't been in country a week and
already you're saltier than shit. You ain't been born yet, New Guy. Wait
until you got a little T.I., candy ass, and then I may allow you to speak.
Yeah, a little fucking time in."
"Gung ho!" I say, grinning.
Animal Mother says, "Fuck you, Joker." He starts breaking down the
machine gun.
I blow Mother a kiss. Animal Mother is a swine, no doubt about it, but