Why Are We in Vietnam?

by Norman Mailer

  Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. That Apache looked like it was vomiting big equipment out of its guts, yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2½ × on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, bird’s-eye maple stock, et cetera, et cetera. Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2 ×-7 variable scope.

  Gun #4 is Ruger…

  Gun #5…

  Forget it. This account has now come right down to the gnat in the navel of the whole week of hunting which is Sweet Medium Sweet Asshole Pete who don’t know about hunting enough to go out and shoot at Texas cactus (which, if you know how to plug it proper, dies with a scream of Pulque blood gushering up and out and an absolutely foul breakwind of Peyote gas) no, Pete has grown up with a nice Savage 99 lever action .250 deer gun, and he runs and freezes his own scared hot shit in a suburban rental frozen food locker when he gets the invitation to Alaska from Rusty, for that means a two- to five-year expediting of his dangerously dull slick as owl shit ascent of the corporation ladder provided he can make it on this Yukon expedition. So he runs out and he borrows a Savage 110 bolt action with Weaver K-4 scope from his deadly daddy (who years ago never thought enough of Pete’s shooting to give him the 110, but laid, instead, the 99 lever action on him for Christmas). Well, that takes one nightmare out of Pete’s head which is cocking that 99 fuck-your-finger lever while a grizzly, perfectly capable of eating whatever the Savage 99 .250 will throw, ambles and slides and tears across the brush at him. And it warms his heart cockles, cause it’s the first treasured thing his daddy ever loaned him. (His daddy’s beginning to breathe thin.) Well, Pete now starts hearing about the bolt action 110. It will stop any game, yeah, if the shot is well placed. Strangle that little news. Pete ain’t looking to make a career of placing his supershots in superb array anywhere but in the office jungle. Don’t tell him about 180-grain Core-Lokt or Silver Tipt, he wants a grenade and bullet all in one sweet cartridge package—he wants a bomb which will drop a grizzly if it hits him in the toe. So he what? Better believe! Comedy is the study of the unsound actions of the cowardly under stress, just as tragedy is equal study time of the brave under heroic but enigmatic, reverberating, resonant conditions of loss—yes, professor, you may keep the change, for D.J. is, mean to say, has got more than a finger into the cunt of genius, Madame Muse. He has now to tell you that poor Very Low-Grade Medium Asshole Pete is so squash-breathed at the ups and downs of careermanship and sudden death which now confront him that he buys—get in line to look at it—from a white-haired riverboat string-tie type of an ex oil well promoter, some friend of his wife’s shiftless uncle’s boss, a third-string Dallas Mafia type (don’t even look how that gun got around to there or the Ford Foundation will be up and along for gropes) this gun being a used, indeed banged-up, African rhinoceros-hippo-elephant-soften-the-bullet-for-the-lion double-barreled .600–.577 custom, only-one-of-its-kind-ever-built Jeffrey Nitro Express carrying a 900-grain bullet for Shot #1, a 750-grain for Shot #2, and a recoil guaranteed to knock a grand piano on its ass. Forget about the French walnut and the Jeffrey action, the Hensoldt Zielklein 2¾ × scope interchangeable with the Redfield 2×-7× blunt picket post with cross wire variable scope on the Pachmayr Lo-Swing mount or the addition of the Lyman aperture in the 17A front sight on the .577 barrel to be used when the rhinoceros is so close, friends, that the use of a telescopic sight is not indicated (which means, Herbert, that you better put the muzzle in your mouth and blast that rhino horn right back out of your ass). Yeah! This was the gun F. Lap-Ass Medium Asshole Pete brought to Alaska for grizzly. When he saw it, Rusty had a pure shit fit. If it hadn’t been a Jeffrey he’d have laughed his nuts off. But, fix on this, Rusty thought he had the only big bore Jeffrey in the State of Texas, and here was his flunky with a bigger, and double!…

  “How’d you get this mother-fuck?” he asked Pete. “I haven’t heard of a double Jeff Nite Express since they used it to kill a Swiss dragon who was terrorizing some Tyrolean village in 1921.”

  “Somebody sold it to me,” Pete confesses.

  “Well, I hope you didn’t pay too much, because the fellow must have stolen it.”

  In fact, Pete has bought it for $1,000 heart-hurting bucks. A swindle and a crime. The two barrels are thus crooked they could shoot each other. Pore Pete, Be Your Boss Pete, has had already to lay out near to $4,200 bucks for this Brooks Range safari-and-gun and has thus had to sell his #2 car, a somewhat used Jag XKE for three big ones plus another thou by converting some Dreyfus Fund into straight cash. He wouldn’t dare sell his Pure Pores debentures, no, nor go further into installment debt.

  Well, Rusty is in a marching state of perturbation. The very presence of that gun seems enough to shatter the tissue or texture of the spell which hangs over every happy hunter. Up in the basin, by the fire, night before the morning Tex killed the wolf, Big Luke has taken one look at Pete’s possession and Rusty knows what he is thinking: this is one extrafine gaggle of goose fat and asshole to contend with for a week. So Rusty attacks. He knows enough to get attention off that Nitro Express! He inquires after Big Ollie’s second gun, knowing pure well there is only the Remington 721, Big Ollie is a man for an all-purpose rifle, and when Big Luke says, “Ollie take care of everything with one gun,” Rusty says, “Yeah, well why’re you carrying a .375?”

  “Ollie can back you up just as well with that .30-06.”

  “You know a .30-06 isn’t going to do the job of a .375 Magnum. It wasn’t designed to,” says Rusty, getting a good old Texas range whine like the ricochet of a bullet off a stupid-ass Texas desert rock. He is obviously thinking of Mr. Grizzer. What Big Luke is thinking is not so far from conjecture. He is either (a) carrying a .375 to make his clients happy, since he shoots good enough to stop anything with a .30-06, a #.270, even a .245 if he got to, or (b) he has lost more nerve than Ollie, so he has more power in his fire stick. Either way, he got to protect Ollie and his one gun, he ain’t getting in a situation where he might have to tell #2 man what sort of gun said #2 is supposed to sling in order to keep Sir Jet-Throne happy.

  Rusty knows all this too, but he hasn’t put in the years being a first-line Ranger Commando in 4C and P for zero return, he knows how to keep an expert on the defensive (and remind him of a nightmare or two) by poking in just hard enough to the mysteries between the facts. “Listen,” says Rusty, “nobody knows finally what’s going to kill big game. Some seem to go over if you put a pin in their butt, others you take right through the heart—they keep running. Running right at you if need be.”

  “Shoot for the shoulder, not the heart,” says Big Luke in a voice like a piece of old oiled gunstock, a voice with a patina—he has said this two thousand times over the years.

  “Right,” says Rusty, “the shoulder. Break the shoulder bone, and they can’t run. Sure. That’s where I want my power. Right there. Right then. Maybe a professional hunter takes pride in dropping an animal by picking him off in a vital spot—but I like the feeling that if I miss a vital area I still can count on the big impact knocking them down, killing them by the total impact, shock! it’s like aerial bombardment in the last Big War,” he said, turning to Tex, D.J., and the Medium Assholes, and dropping his voice as if he were now imparting the flavor of the secret jellies and jams used in black mass of real military lore, “why, face up, gentlemen, the British were right, hear, hear, they were right for once, you don’t pinpoint vital areas in a city, you blot it all out, you bury it deep in fire, shit, and fury. Then when the war’s over they’re glad to see you come in. It’s just like if you get in a fight with a fellow, you’re well advised to destroy him half to death. If y’get h
im down, use your shoe on his face, employ your imagination, give him a working-over, hard to believe, but often enough that man is your friend afterward, you’ve made him sane—maybe he thought before he had the fight with you he could lick whatever was in sight so he was half-crazy, now he knows that is not exactly so. Whereas if you give him a nice clean whipping, you’ve stimulated him to give you a nice clean whipping back. Of course, the analogy is not perfect, Luke, but I am forced to wonder about the fine difference in ethics between using Ollie’s .30-06, and my Special .404, or your .375. Yes, it may be our animals will die a degree more from shock and a hint less from vital execution. But of what final ethical consequence is that, where is the fine difference?”

  “Your meat tastes better when you’re executed,” said Tex.

  Big Luke gave a laugh, Rusty gave a look at the undertaker’s son. “Let me just tell you,” he said into the fire, “I hope I don’t have to stand on tiptoe too long waiting for you, Tex, to squeeze a needle out of your .270.”

  “You won’t,” said Tex.

  Well, M.A. Pete heard all of this and more, he heard from his tentmate M.A. Bill a little later that night, for Bill was a ballistics nut and had spent one full vacation in the ballistics department of the FBI in the Department of Justice building in D.C. (having used the influence of his boss Death-row Jelly-Go Jet-Throne and the friendship of some of the local FBI to be accepted as a guest-visitor and temporary student on the comparative rank basis of police captain so that M.A. Bill got his studying in with visiting foreigners like the head of the Ghana Police Department, and the Mozambique Police Department, and native fuzz from Spokane, Walla Walla, Greensboro—they were all taking the full invitation and orientation course in updated police detection methods, but M.A. Bill was no investigator manqué, rather he was a ballistics nut, and that’s where he stayed for two hot blazing summer weeks in the air-conditioned laboratories of the ballistics boys). He’d always gone in for handloading his cartridges, but when he got back, he was abruptly become the cartridge expert in his rifle club cause he could advise you on the FBI selection and use of bullets, primer, case, shot, and powder, he was up on the latest Department of Justice methods of determining chamber pressure, mean effective pressure, hunting loads, reasonable uses for black powder, new powders, flash holes, bullet castings, bullet swaging, etc., he had a spread of loading tools, dies, accessories, components, lathes, and was therefore all equipped to wildcat his own. Some of them were pretty hot. M.A. Bill had been known to come into the office with gunpowder injected in his pores, but a breech had never blown up in his face. Of course, no dentist has love for a doctor, and no wildcatter has a good word for a factory cartridge. M.A. Pete had been ready after Rusty’s contumely to bury his Jeffrey Nitro Express and make the trip with the Savage 110 .30-06, but M.A. Bill squared him off on that. He let him in on the secret—factory ammunition was the unspoken scandal of American life, and .30-06, well in M.A. Bill’s opinion, they were the worst offenders. The f.p.s. (foot per second, knothead!) variations had been known to go up to 5 percent, and one box in not that very many you’d be surprised had such variations and fluctuations in their max. vel., as tested on the chronograph that trajectories could even be affected. Which meant? Pete wanted to know. Errors in shooting, said M.A. Bill. D.J. is here to tell you that M.A. Pete wished to hear no more, which was error indeed, cause a little cross-examination would have revealed that M.A. Bill was talking about a difference which was not an inch at one hundred yards, not by half. You see, fellow Americans, statistics perverts, and number addicts, the greatest effect of variation in powder loadings speaks up after you go by the sign which says, “You are a rifle bullet passing the three-hundred-yard mark and are bound soon to dip. Keep your nose up!” In fact, M.A. Bill like most ballistics nuts was as nearsighted as an old hound with silver rim lenses so his critique is academic for himself. He’s not interested in where the bullet goes, he just wants to stuff it full of the right sort of smokeless. Love, love, the Good Lord may have had no idea how far he cast his seed.

  “But your gun is a .30-06,” says M.A. Pete.

  “Yes, but I’ve had it rechambered and with a custom barrel. I make my own shell for it. A .311. I wouldn’t ever use a .30-06.”

  “Oh,” said Pete, “that .311 must really do the job.”

  “You can go to sleep on that,” said M.A. Bill.

  M.A. Pete did not sleep too well. He had visions of a grizzly bearing down on him with a wild cry like a Nigger washerwoman gone ape with a butcher knife, and he had seen himself forced to face such music with the slim pencil of a .30-06. He had had dreams of bringing it off with a .30-06 but that buried scandal of American sporting rifle cartridge ammo f.p.s. discrepancies recounted to him by M.A. Bill had the front sight of his Savage 110 wavering like a fly wing in his mind’s eye. If the aim of the bullet could not be trusted, then of what purport the gun? So, fuck if he didn’t have his hand on the double Jeffrey all night long and kiss your own ass deep in the heart of Texas if the elephant gun wasn’t the tool that M.A. Pete brought with him when he went running down into the valley and the green park of lawn below the black-ass gray basin, down in the sweet green grass right after Tex shot his wolf, that grass green as an English lawn, just where the trees ended and the mountain went up in a gray dome. And standing around, looking at the dead wolf, he looked up, and he, the medium asshole, was the first to see a caribou two hundred yards away through the thin trees, and in the accurate fevered inaccuracy of being awake a night without sleep, he took a sight and the cross hairs on the scope ran a figure eight around the horns, which then plummeted down around the hooves, flew up past the tail into the air, about, and back over the caribou’s flanks to a view, all abrupt, honest, naked, and hairy of the buck’s testicles magnified 4×, which to M.A. Pete’s unprotected eye was equal in force and simple animal revelation to the first sight provided an innocent maiden of a workingman’s balls, and then past caribou’s deer nuts in a blur as if M.A. Pete was in a movie traveling the curves so it was all a blur, and around came the sights again to the back of the hocks and up and RUMBA! went the Jeffrey and the .600 Nitro Express shot on its way and M.A. Pete took a blow to the shoulder on recoil which canted his vertebrae 3 degrees 21 minutes right then and there, and Wow! came a sound next to him, for the caribou leaped in the air, did a crazy dance, and was off in the woods.

  Intro Beep 6

  Well, D.J.’s consciousness must be expiring in the brackish backwaters of a sluggish narrative, for we have been hung up in numbers, details, and all sorts of overspecific technical data as if it were scum, slime, pollen slick, floating twigs, and wet rotting leaves all meandering down a dead-ass stream, but, man, you leave those paved streets and get your ass flown abruptly from the high technological nexus and overdeveloped civilization of a megacity like the Dallas–Fort Worth complex into a riptide impact and collision area marginated halfway between civilization and a nature culture-primitive constellation (like Alaska, man) and then intensify such culture shock by inserting the subjects (1 H.A., 2 M.A., and 2 TA½T)—which latter stands for Tex and D.J. (2 Tough Adolescents ½ Tested)—well, you might just as well sing along with the Rotten Moss and the Red Hots, Yeah, I Got an Itching in My Palm Which Some Call Love, because that’s shock, Mr. Buzz-buzz, up from Dallas into the Brooks Range, and boys like Rusty and the M.A.s all being men, there’s just nothing to do with Mr. Anxiety but carry him around in place of Herr Dread, and hang out those numbers, Harvey, don’t forsake those names, Nelson, remember that being up from Dallas so abrupt makes a man feel small and modest like he’s full of shit, so give a little Christian bomb, spelled b-a-l-m, and forgive and forget that slow smelly backed-up hardly moving narrative stream of facts, figures and general meaningless horseshit which D.J. has been feeding, and fix your eye on the white stumpy tail and sweet white ass of the buck caribou up and bounding away and now the problem is to track him.

  Chap Six

  D.J., your presumptive philosopher, has not ma
de the grand connection yet between the balls and the ears although he would claim they are related—more of this later, maybe—but the eyes are of course attached to the asshole as beginning is to end: the end is putting something out—the beginning is to see what you are going to have to shit out, and that right here in Brooks Range is easy to know because it will be the recollection of the blood on the cotton white ass of that caribou just hit by M.A. Pete. A liver-vitiating sight, Carter, for the liver goes flat, D.J. would assure you, whenever some scent meets its deodorant, or an herb is fed with aspirin. Pretty literary for adolescent out hunting with Paw? Go fuck, D.J.’s got his purchase on the big thing—genius—and he know this: you deaden a mystery and your liver goes to shit. This chase for a torn-ass caribou revolves around a simple mystery, to wit the ass of the caribou is white, its stumpy tail is white, soft as a white ruffle at Milady Hightits throat, so D.J. ask you why? Why is the rear view of a thousand head of caribou passing on the tundra like a thousand pops of cotton on the boll? That’s a dead-ass question—the ass of your mind go dead trying to answer, yeah, and here was just one caribou, off on a split through the woods. But we all had one look, one crack of a look at something red and hanging bad and loose like a wattle from the white fur. Then we were all walking and jogging down an open aisle of moss-green grass to the spot in the timber two hundred fifty yards below where the deer had plunged in.

  Blood for his trail, drops the size of every kind of coin, silver dollars up to florins, even—one the size of a small plate—brown blood already corrupted by a hive of near invisible devourers, insect shitters, chiggers and flies, one big Alaska bumblebee still alive on this cold early September morning, and the sun shining right in the blood with a thousand lights, or so it would look if you had your nose right there on the bloodied leaves close enough to that wet to think you were looking at neon signs, the woods were full of awe, nothing other, the trees standing numb, cowardly spectators, man, watching one of their own take a wasting.