How strange that hardly a year before we stood together in the Forest of Assassins, the radio’s antenna waving in the air like a great black arrow pointing ever and always to my blood and bone. The fact that we both escaped the entirety of the war unmarred in body if not in spirit did not speak of skill or even of luck but instead only of randomness. Chiggers, being Catholic, might well have felt otherwise, but I could not understand how one could hold fast to the idea of a benevolent God watching over one’s physical and moral self in the midst of what was, quite literally, a quagmire. And now we sat smoking and drinking endless coffee in the landscape of my childhood. What world was this? How did this world and the Forest of Assassins exist simultaneously? Along a muddy canal, a line of thatch-roofed hootches exploded into gouts of bright orange flame. How many human beings had been inside? A half dozen? A dozen? More? Men and women and children burned alive. We counted them all as VC kills. And in all the ways I could tabulate, every one of those kills had been mine. Hot contact north river. Yankee Sierra. Zero-One. Five-Seven. Six-Two. Smoking purple haze. And then straining to hear the impossible shriek of the Phantoms as they came screaming down their fire from on high.
Chiggers and I had already talked about some of the guys from the old company but neither of us had any real information to share. One of our squad members was getting married—we had both received wedding invitations—but he lived in rural Alabama and that provided excuse enough not to attend. We mumbled about money but in fact we simply did not want to see him acting as if life were normal and that it would go on despite all we had done and all we had failed to do.
I do not know why I began to tell him of the first time I drove Mrs. Wilson to San Jose. Perhaps it was only because that trip had begun something which had managed to hold my own interest sufficiently enough for me to expend some effort in investigating its contours. I had begun telling him of the strange conversation in Mrs. Takahashi’s living room and then swerved into a long digression that ended with the buses departing the square. That Chiggers, stoned as he was, could somehow remember where the story had begun was a kind of miracle. He had asked what had happened to Ray Takahashi and now sat as expectant as a Labrador, smiling and awaiting my response.
“I don’t know what happened to him,” I told him. “Nobody knows.”
“But his girl had a baby.”
“Yeah that’s right.”
“His baby.”
I nodded.
“So he came back to find her?”
“He might have,” I said, “but really I don’t think he knew.”
“About the baby?” Chiggers sucked at his cigarette. “Why’d he come back, then?”
“Nobody knows that either.”
“Ay, Dios mío,” Chiggers said then. “Nobody knows nothing about nothing.”
“I guess not,” I said, realizing as I said it that it was not, in fact, much of a story to tell, and we fell back to sipping at our coffees and puffing at our cigarettes. I wondered how much more pot he had in the paper bag in his car and how much money I could scrape together to buy some before he was once again on the road to Oregon.
Chiggers might have looked different in some ways but he had not changed; he was still and ever would be the same old Chiggers from Dong Tam and the Plain of Reeds and the million nameless waterways that snaked endlessly through the mangroves and palms and cocoa trees, those shadowed tunnels that seem, even now, to pull me toward whatever horrors lay curtained by their green light.
The waitress brought our meals then. Chiggers’s plate was piled high with eggs and sausage and bacon and pancakes like a monument to all the breakfasts we wished for in Vietnam. Mine was much the same.
CHIGGERS TOLD ME upon arrival that he would need to be back on the road as soon as possible and yet our evening at Denny’s wore on, and at some point he suggested that he might wander over to the motel desk to see what a room might cost him. It was then that I suggested my grandmother’s sofa, small though it was. “The old lady won’t mind?” Chiggers said, smiling his familiar grin.
“I’ll need to ask her,” I said, “but I think she’ll be fine with it.”
And she was, not only fine with it but seemingly relieved, as if his presence provided a temporary salve for some aspect of my life that she had questioned. She asked if we needed something to eat or drink and then retired to her bedroom. We moved to the porch off the back of the house then, its nightscape a small box of overgrown grass—I should have cut it but had not—and a gnarled old plum tree laden with fruit, the rotten scent of which sometimes wafted across to us in the dark and infrequent breeze. It may have been a poor choice to sit in the dark like that—we might have retired, instead, to the boozy back room of that Denny’s with its dingy bar and dance floor—for Chiggers’s presence had brought a quickness to my chest, a feeling that the great span of the Pacific had folded over on itself in the night so that the seventy-eight hundred miles that separated me from the Nine Dragon River had lessened and lessened until I could almost—but not quite—see the tracer rounds red-lining across the black sky beyond the fence.
“I’m glad you’re okay, man,” Chiggers said.
“Yeah, well, I’m glad you’re okay too,” I told him.
He was silent for a long time, puffing at his cigarette. In the night all around us, there yet remained a sense of sun-heat radiating up through the deck boards, from the trees, from the grass, but the air itself had cooled enough that I felt gooseflesh rise to my skin. From the dark shadows of the yard’s shaggy verdancy came the overlapping chirp of crickets beyond which drifted the occasional shush of cars on the interstate or the great choking moan of a diesel truck barreling downhill against its gearbox. I tried to find words that might divert Chiggers from the drift of his own mind but nothing would come and at last his voice reappeared from the shadows. “It’s just that, well, you know, you kinda faded out toward the end there,” he said. “I mean we all did, right, but after Phil and Dan and all that shit. That was a hard time.”
“It was all a hard time.”
“You know what I mean.” Chiggers pulled on his cigarette. Mine had been smoked down to the nub. For reasons I could hardly articulate, I suddenly and inexplicably wanted him to leave. I had tried not to think of him or any of them. Although I never moved much further than the one piece in Esquire and the various note cards stacked by the typewriter in my grandmother’s spare bedroom, when I thought of Vietnam it was almost always as a source of fiction. The quality of invention offered a tangible albeit illusory sense of control that extended not just to the landscape but to specific situations and characters, so that even though my fictional squadmates lived and died in ways not so far removed from their actual counterparts, the role of random and unfeeling overlord was not that of some distant God but was rather my own. I could ponder the feeling of it all and the topography and the intensity of the green, and the unmitigated liquid seep, and the high metallic shriek of gunfire, and the bright eruptions of orange flame when the Phantoms came low and obliterated their targets, but the actual facts of my own experience I held in secret, a feat of memory which I recommitted to each night. So I had tried not to think of any of them. Not Phil or Apache Dan or Skip or Mark-One or Mama or Professor Ted. Not even Chiggers.
My fear in that moment was that Chiggers would want to talk through it all. I expected his voice to come out of the darkness, from the point of his cigarette: “Do you remember what Professor Ted said that time when we were in the boat on the Vàm Cỏ Đông?” and I would say, “You mean the time when we called in the air strike on that village?” and he would say, “Which village? There were a million fucking villages,” and I would say, “Two million,” and he would say something like, “Three,” and then, “You loved your radio, ese. Call in the big guns,” and I would say, “No doubt about that,” and we would both laugh. I had called in so many air strikes that neither of us could have ever kept count of them all, and we would go on like that, maybe all night.
&n
bsp; But he did not say this or anything like it. Perhaps Chiggers too felt the need to both talk and not talk about that time in our lives. Perhaps acknowledging that we were both okay was enough because it acknowledged that although we were alive neither of us was really okay or ever would be.
CHIGGERS TOOK THE FLOOR of my room, as I knew my grandmother would be up and about early in the morning and I knew too that my friend and I would sleep well past her waking. I could hear him begin snoring almost immediately. That simple sound might have gotten us all killed just a year earlier, a thought which reminded me that in many ways I had never really left that place. I had mustered out in April and yet there remained a sense of humidity in the dark thick muscle of my heart, that tight fist continuing to pump even as all those others—friends and companions and enemies too—had disappeared into the flat relaxed palm of death. In the end, they loaded me into a 747 filled with similar survivors, only a few of whom I knew at all, Chiggers among them, and that great silver ship had lifted into the sky and we, those who had lived through it, burst, as one, into applause. The landscape that shrank beneath the windows of the plane had become synonymous with death, from the sucking mud to the biting ants and snakes to the water buffalo and grass-roofed villages standing in the deep green of palms and reeds, the very richness, the living fecundity of the place predicated upon the simultaneity of its rank and fetid decay. And yet from the air it looked a tropical paradise, prelapsarian in its beauty and grace, its shape shining through the vaporous scrim of my own escape, my own understanding that I was alive, that I was still alive.
Nestled in my duffel on that flight were the notebooks and cards that now sat next to the disused typewriter under the window just a few feet from where I lay. I did not need to thumb through that material to recall what it contained: a series of disjointed and garbled ideas, sentences, fragments, character names without explanation, dates without referent, untethered and unexplained anecdotes (“tell them about the goose” and “bbq at the Bon Mot” and “Chesty’s dream”). It occurs to me now that there is likely a wealth of possible fictions to be found in those notes, but at the time they felt a kind of flood that washed over my imagination with such force that I could hardly stand to look at them, leaving my brain simply empty of ideas, empty even of sentences.
The members of my company were good men on the whole but Chiggers was the one to whom I felt the closest. I wanted to talk endlessly about books and writers and he seemed perfectly willing to listen and even to comment and ask questions and challenge what I took as basic and inviolable facts. I believed Faulkner was a better writer than Hemingway and that Thomas Wolfe was the best of them all. I liked Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer and James Jones. Chiggers had come from a world I had sometimes glimpsed when I had lived in Southern California and the stories he told of his extended Catholic family, both in Mexico and scattered up and down the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle, were filled with hilarity and heartbreak. He had lived through travails the likes of which I could only dream about and had come through them tough and open and honest and loyal. I envied that about him, that he had such experiences to draw power from, and I wished I had something similar in my own life but my experiences, up to that point, felt unilaterally shallow and pointless.
The base at which we were then stationed consisted of a great sea of tents and cinder-block buildings and plywood structures set in series of staggered and ill-fitting gridworks upon a field of endless mud surrounded by rice paddies and thick jungle. Along the southern boundary ran the brown flow of one of the innumerable rivers that comprised the delta. There was a small Vietnamese town nearby, a town constructed during the French occupation of the region and one therefore rumored to be quite beautiful in the manner of quaint and tender imperialism, but we regular grunts were not allowed to go there and in all the time I was stationed at that muddy base I never once walked its French-inflected streets.
We were, indeed, near-prisoners of the base, which made my feeling of isolation all the more acute. It was into this deep well of loneliness that I poured myself, my obsession with words and writers and writing reaching a kind of fever pitch in the first months of my time in that mud field, an obsession broken only momentarily by the mixture of boredom and terror that struck me each time my unit was ordered outside the wire and into the jungle beyond. I had learned very early that were I to die in Vietnam, my death was unlikely to be in actual combat but rather via a form of random deliverance impossible to predict or to fight against: a sniper’s bullet, a land mine, or any number of nefarious and ingenious booby traps set by the invisible enemy. I had read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and had imagined war with a clear enemy who would be fierce and uniformed and would be, of course, indisputably in the wrong, and we would fight them on terms agreed upon by both sides using the military might we had each built and the training we had each received. But in fact it was wholly unclear what we were trying to do in those endless islands and waterways, the whole of it seeming to rise up from beneath us like the incoming tides, leaving only the great twisted vertical shapes of the mangroves towering from that muddy influx.
Two months shy of my return from that country, my unit took fire from a thick dark tangle of jungle near the village of Cái Bè. We had been out beyond the wire for several days and I had the increasingly claustrophobic feeling that sometimes came upon me when I felt certain that death’s bony fingers were preparing to pull me under the malarial waters, so when the first shots rang out I was almost relieved, for the waiting, at least, was over. I could hear Chiggers shouting from somewhere to my left and the others scattering everywhere through the shallow mire. And already my friends were dying. Phil. Apache Dan. Professor Ted.
I did not know I had been screaming until I dialed air command and had to stop long enough to relay a set of coordinates. There was no order given me and the coordinates I shouted into the handset would bring half the jungle to our north to flame. When I was done I lay down in the mud, my hands on my helmet, listening to the rounds zip into the brown water and tick through the trees and foliage all around. I could hear, as if from very far away, the sounds of the others in my unit—those still alive—their voices raised against the onslaught of their own firepower.
I was a coward. I did not return fire. Not that day. Instead I lay on my back in the crushed grass, staring up at the sky and weeping and waiting for the F-4s. When that great screeching came at last I rolled to my belly to watch as the trees went black and the whole world beyond burst into a wall of orange flame. I had seen countless air strikes but this had been the most magnificent and I shouted at the sight of those acres and acres gone bright with fire.
When they took the dead away and Chiggers and I and the others wandered through the char of that long swath of destruction, what we found beyond was a burned and desolate village of the dead, among its razed reed structures a cinder-block building, likely built by the U.S. Army as a show of goodwill, its walls still intact but its roof fully burned away. The children within were tiny bone-black sculptures melted to their desks. And I ask you this: Are they more human to you because they are children?
“Fuck fuck fuck,” our unit commander shouted. “Everyone out. We’re getting the fuck out of here right now.” And then, to me: “This is on you, you stupid fuck.”
I do not think any of us in that unit ever really recovered from that day. Six of us were killed and the remainder who survived stumbled through the last two months of our sentence with a kind of grim and quiet determination. We did not talk of it. Had it not been for Chiggers I do not think I would have made it through, for he, at least, seemed capable of continuing to live with some semblance of grace and dignity and even humor. And it was Chiggers too who would, in the dark of the night when I could not stop weeping, tell me that he was grateful for what I had done. “You saved us,” he would say. “Don’t think of it any other way. You saved us.”
Men, women, children, and water buffalo: all were counted among the enemy
dead. Command pointed us in the supposed direction of the supposed enemy and so it was into that direction we poured the full liquid metal of our arsenal, the great hot barrage of it like a tunnel of teeth chewing the whole of the landscape down to stubble. God help anyone who stumbled into its path. I thought that if I could only articulate its voracity, on the page, that I might straighten my thoughts, my heart like a burnished disc of hot brass spinning endlessly in the tropic sunlight, its sound a continuous, susurrate hiss.
In the room, in the darkness, from the floor, Chiggers mumbled in his sleep. What I thought of was squelch and volume and my voice screaming into the handset. Whiskey Dragon to Rosebud. Hot contact. Hot contact. God I would do it all again if it meant I would live.
8
CHIGGERS LEFT FOR OREGON IN THE MORNING, PROMISING me that he would stop by again on Wednesday or Thursday of the following week, when his return to San Diego would bring him back down the interstate. Had it turned out that way, some of this story might have been different, but of course the stories we tell about our lives, the true stories, can only describe what actually occurred. We can act as if we might have chosen some alternate path, all the while knowing that, had any of us the ability to roll back time, we would, given the same information, make the same cowardly decisions all over again. And all the people I had a hand in killing would still be dead. And I would still be alive.
Phantoms Page 10
