The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

  "Okay," Rat finally said. "We got a problem."

  When he first told the story, Rat stopped there and looked at Mitchell Sanders for a time.

  "So what's your vote? Where was she?"

  "The Greenies," Sanders said.

  "Yeah?"

  Sanders gave him a savvy little smirk. "No other option. That stuff about the Special Forces—how they used the place as a base of operations, how they'd glide in and out—all that had to be there for a reason. That's how stories work, man."

  Rat thought about it, then shrugged.

  "All right, sure, the Greenies. But it's not what Fossie thought. She wasn't sleeping with any of them. At least not exactly. I mean, in a way she was sleeping with all of them, more or less, except it wasn't sex or anything. They was just lying together, so to speak, Mary Anne and these six grungy weirded-out Green Berets."

  "Lying down?" Sanders said.

  "You got it."

  "Lying down how?"

  Rat smiled. "Ambush. All night long, man, Mary Anne's out on fuckin' ambush."

  ***

  Just after sunrise, Rat said, she came trooping in through the wire, tired-looking but cheerful as she dropped her gear and gave Mark Fossie a brisk hug. The six Green Berets did not speak. One of them nodded at her, and the others gave Fossie a long stare, then they filed off to their hootch at the edge of the compound.

  "Please," she said. "Not a word."

  Fossie took a half step forward and hesitated. It was as though he had trouble recognizing her. She wore a bush hat and filthy green fatigues; she carried the standard M-16 automatic assault rifle; her face was black with charcoal.

  Mary Anne handed him the weapon. "I'm exhausted," she said. "We'll talk later."

  She glanced over at the Special Forces area, then turned and walked quickly across the compound toward her own bunker. Fossie stood still for a few seconds. A little dazed, it seemed. After a moment, though, he set his jaw and went after her with a hard, fast stride.

  "Not later!" he yelled. "Now!"

  What happened between them, Rat said, nobody ever knew for sure. But in the mess hall that evening it was clear that an accommodation had been reached. Or more likely, he said, it was a case of setting down some new rules. Mary Anne's hair was freshly shampooed. She wore a white blouse, a navy blue skirt, a pair of plain black flats. Over dinner she kept her eyes down, poking at her food, subdued to the point of silence. Eddie Diamond and some of the others tried to nudge her into talking about the ambush—What was the feeling out there? What exactly did she see and hear?—but the questions seemed to give her trouble. Nervously, she'd look across the table at Fossie. She'd wait a moment, as if to receive some sort of clearance, then she'd bow her head and mumble out a vague word or two. There were no real answers.

  Mark Fossie, too, had little to say.

  "Nobody's business," he told Rat that night. "One thing for sure, there won't be any more ambushes. No more late nights."

  "You laid down the law?"

  "Compromise," Fossie said. "I'll put it this way—we're officially engaged."

  Rat nodded cautiously.

  "Well hey, she'll make a sweet bride," he said. "Combat ready."

  Over the next several days there was a strained, tightly wound quality to the way they treated each other, a rigid correctness that was enforced by repetitive acts of willpower. To look at them from a distance, Rat said, you would think they were the happiest two people on the planet. They spent the long afternoons sunbathing together, stretched out side by side on top of their bunker, or playing backgammon in the shade of a giant palm tree, or just sitting quietly. A model of togetherness, it seemed. And yet at close range their faces showed the tension. Too polite, too thoughtful. Mark Fossie tried hard to keep up a self-assured pose, as if nothing had ever come between them, or ever could, but there was a fragility to it, something tentative and false. If Mary Anne happened to move a few steps away from him, even briefly, he'd tighten up and force himself not to watch her. But then a moment later he'd be watching.

  In the presence of others, at least, they kept on their masks. Over meals they talked about plans for a huge wedding in Cleveland Heights—a two-day bash, lots of flow ers. And yet even then their smiles seemed too intense. They were too quick with their banter; they held hands as if afraid to let go.

  It had to end, and eventually it did.

  Near the end of the third week Fossie began making arrangements to send her home. At first, Rat said, Mary Anne seemed to accept it, but then after a day or two she fell into a restless gloom, sitting off by herself at the compound's perimeter. Shoulders hunched, her blue eyes opaque, she seemed to disappear inside herself. A couple of times Fossie approached her and tried to talk it out, but Mary Anne just stared out at the dark green mountains to the west. The wilderness seemed to draw her in. A haunted look, Rat said—partly terror, partly rapture. It was as if she had come up on the edge of something, as if she were caught in that no-man's-land between Cleveland Heights and deep jungle. Seventeen years old. Just a child, blond and innocent, but then weren't they all?

  The next morning she was gone. The six Greenies were gone, too.

  In a way, Rat said, poor Fossie expected it, or something like it, but that did not help much with the pain. The kid couldn't function. The grief took him by the throat and squeezed and would not let go.

  "Lost," he kept whispering.

  It was nearly three weeks before she returned. But in a sense she never returned. Not entirely, not all of her.

  By chance, Rat said, he was awake to see it. A damp misty night, he couldn't sleep, so he'd gone outside for a quick smoke. He was just standing there, he said, watching the moon, and then off to the west a column of silhouettes appeared as if by magic at the margin of the jungle. At first he didn't recognize her—a small, soft shadow among six other shadows. There was no sound. No real substance either. The seven silhouettes seemed to float across the surface of the earth, like spirits, vaporous and unreal. As he watched, Rat said, it made him think of some freaky opium dream. The silhouettes moved without moving. Silently, one by one, they came up the hill, passed through the wire, and drifted in a loose file across the compound. It was then, Rat said, that he picked out Mary Anne's face. Her eyes seemed to shine in the dark—not blue, though, but a bright glowing jungle green. She did not pause at Fossie's bunker. She cradled her weapon and moved swiftly to the Special Forces hootch and followed the others inside.

  Briefly, a light came on, and someone laughed, then the place went dark again.

  Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can't clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.

  But Rat Kiley couldn't help it. He wanted to bracket the full range of meaning.

  "I know it sounds far-out," he'd tell us, "but it's not like impossible or anything. We all heard plenty of wackier stories. Some guy comes back from the bush, tells you he saw the Virgin Mary out there, she was riding a goddamn goose or something. Everybody buys it. Everybody smiles and asks how fast was they going, did she have spurs on. Well, it's not like that. This Mary Anne wasn't no virgin but at least she was real. I saw it. When she came in through the wire that night, I was right there, I saw those eyes of hers, I saw how she wasn't even the same person no more. What's so impossible about that? She was a girl, that's all. I mean, if it was a guy, everybody'd say, Hey, no big deal, he got caught up in the Nam shit, he got seduced by the Greenies. See what I mean? You got these blinders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are. All that crap about how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn't be no more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist
attitude."

  Rat would go on like that until Mitchell Sanders couldn't tolerate it any longer. It offended his inner ear.

  "The story," Sanders would say. "The whole tone, man, you're wrecking it."

  "Tone?"

  "The sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened."

  Frowning, Rat would close his eyes.

  "Tone?" he'd say. "I didn't know it was all that complicated. The girl joined the zoo. One more animal—end of story."

  "Yeah, fine. But tell it right."

  At daybreak the next morning, when Mark Fossie heard she was back, he stationed himself outside the fenced-off Special Forces area. All morning he waited for her, and all afternoon. Around dusk Rat brought him something to eat.

  "She has to come out," Fossie said. "Sooner or later, she has to."

  "Or else what?" Rat said.

  "I go get her. I bring her out."

  Rat shook his head. "Your decision. I was you, though, no way I'd mess around with any Greenie types, not for nothing."

  "It's Mary Anne in there."

  "Sure, I know that. All the same, I'd knock real extra super polite."

  Even with the cooling night air Fossie's face was slick with sweat. He looked sick. His eyes were bloodshot; his skin had a whitish, almost colorless cast. For a few minutes Rat waited with him, quietly watching the hootch, then he patted the kid's shoulder and left him alone.

  It was after midnight when Rat and Eddie Diamond went out to check on him. The night had gone cold and steamy, a low fog sliding down from the mountains, and out in the dark there was music playing. Not loud but not soft either. It had a chaotic, almost unmusical sound, without rhythm or form or progression, like the noise of nature. A synthesizer, it seemed, or maybe an electric organ. In the background, just audible, a woman's voice was half singing, half chanting, but the lyrics seemed to be in a foreign tongue.

  They found Fossie squatting near the gate in front of the Special Forces area. Head bowed, he was swaying to the music, his face wet and shiny. As Eddie bent down beside him, the kid looked up with eyes, not quite in register, ashen and powdery.

  "Hear that?" he whispered. "You hear? It's Mary Anne." Eddie Diamond took his arm. "Let's get you inside. Somebody's radio, that's all it is. Move it now."

  "Mary Anne. Just listen."

  "Sure, but—"

  "Listen!"

  Fossie suddenly pulled away, twisting sideways, and fell back against the gate. He lay there with his eyes closed. The music—the noise, whatever it was—came from the hootch beyond the fence. The place was dark except for a small glowing window, which stood partly open, the panes dancing in bright reds and yellows as though the glass were on fire. The chanting seemed louder now. Fiercer, too, and higher pitched.

  Fossie pushed himself up. He wavered for a moment and then forced the gate open.

  "That voice," he said. "Mary Anne."

  Rat took a step forward, reaching out for him, but Fossie was already moving fast toward the hootch. He stumbled once, caught himself, and struck the door hard with both arms. There was a noise—a short screeching sound, like a cat—and the door swung in and Fossie was framed there for an instant, his arms stretched out, and then he slipped inside. After a moment Rat and Eddie followed quietly. Just inside the door they found Fossie bent down on one knee. He wasn't moving.

  Across the room a dozen candles were burning on the floor near the open window. The place seemed to echo with a deep-wilderness sound—tribal music—bamboo flutes and drums and chimes. But what hit you first, Rat said, was the smell. Two kinds of smells. There was a topmost scent of joss sticks and incense, like the fumes of some exotic smokehouse, but beneath the smoke lay a deeper and much more powerful stench. Impossible to describe, Rat said. It paralyzed your lungs. Thick and numbing, like an animal's den, a mix of blood and scorched hair and excrement and the sweet-sour odor of moldering flesh—the stink of the kill. But that wasn't all. On a post at the rear of the hootch was the decayed head of a large black leopard; strips of yellow-brown skin dangled from the overhead rafters. And bones. Stacks of bones—all kinds. To one side, propped up against a wall, stood a poster in neat black lettering: ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN GOOK!! FREE SAMPLE KIT!! The images came in a swirl, Rat said, and there was no way you could process it all. Off in the gloom a few dim figures lounged in hammocks, or on cots, but none of them moved or spoke. The background music came from a tape deck near the circle of candles, but the high voice was Mary Anne's.

  Mark Fossie started to get up but then stiffened.

  "Mary Anne?" he said.

  Quietly then, she stepped out of the shadows. At least for a moment she seemed to be the same pretty young girl who had arrived a few weeks earlier. She was barefoot. She wore her pink sweater and a white blouse and a simple cotton skirt.

  For a long while the girl gazed down at Fossie, almost blankly, and in the candlelight her face had the composure of someone perfectly at peace with herself. It took a few seconds, Rat said, to appreciate the full change. In part it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent. There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one tongue overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable.

  Just for a moment the girl looked at Mark Fossie with something close to contempt.

  "There's no sense talking," she said. "I know what you think, but it's not ... it's not bad."

  "Bad?" Fossie murmured.

  "It's not."

  In the shadows there was laughter.

  One of the Greenies sat up and lighted a cigar. The others lay silent.

  "You're in a place," Mary Anne said softly, "where you don't belong."

  She moved her hand in a gesture that encompassed not just the hootch but everything around it, the entire war, the mountains, the mean little villages, the trails and trees and rivers and deep misted-over valleys.

  "You just don't know," she said. "You hide in this little fortress, behind wire and sandbags, and you don't know ... Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country — the dirt, the death—I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me. That's how I feel. It's like this appetite. I get scared sometimes—lots of times—but it's not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark—I'm on fire almost — I'm burning away into nothing—but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am. You can't feel like that anywhere else."

  All this was said without drama, as if to herself, her voice slow and impassive. She was not trying to persuade. For a few moments she looked at Mark Fossie, who seemed to shrink away, then she turned and moved back into the gloom.

  There was nothing to be done.

  Rat took Fossie's arm, helped him up, and led him outside. In the darkness there was that flipped-out tribal music, which seemed to come from the earth itself, from the deep rain forest, and a woman's voice rising up in a language beyond translation.

  Mark Fossie stood rigid.

  "Do something," he whispered. "I can't just let her go like that."

  Rat listened for a time, then shook his head.

  "Man, you must be deaf. She's already gone."

  Rat Kiley stopped there, almost in midsentence, which drove Mitchell Sanders crazy.

  "What next?" he said.

  "Next?"

  "The girl. What happened to her?"

  Rat made a small, tired motion with his shoulders. "Hard to tell for sure. Three, four days later I got orders to report here to Alpha Company. Jumped the first chopper out, that's the last I ever seen of the place. Mary Anne,
too."

  Mitchell Sanders stared at him.

  "You can't do that."

  "Do what?"

  "Jesus Christ, it's against the rules," Sanders said. "Against human nature. This elaborate story, you can't say, Hey, by the way, I don't know the ending. I mean, you got certain obligations."

  Rat gave a quick smile. "Okay, man, but up to now, ev erything I told you is from personal experience, the exact truth. There's a few other things I heard secondhand. Third-hand, actually. From here on it gets to be ... I don't know what the word is."

  "Speculation."

  "Yeah, right." Rat looked off to the west, scanning the mountains, as if expecting something to appear on one of the high ridgelines. After a second he shrugged. "Anyhow, maybe two months later I ran into Eddie Diamond over in Bangkok—I was on R&R, just this fluke thing—and he told me some stuff I can't vouch for with my own eyes. Even Eddie didn't really see it. He heard it from one of the Greenies, so you got to take this with a whole shakerful of salt."

  Once more, Rat searched the mountains, then he sat back and closed his eyes.

  "You know," he said abruptly, "I loved her."

  "Say again?"

  "A lot. We all did, I guess. The way she looked, Mary Anne made you think about those girls back home, how pure and innocent they all are, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. Try to tell them about it, they'll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won't understand zip. It's like trying to tell somebody what chocolate tastes like."

  Mitchell Sanders nodded. "Or shit."

  "There it is, you got to taste it, and that's the thing with Mary Anne. She was there. She was up to her eyeballs in it. After the war, man, I promise you, you won't find nobody like her."

  Suddenly, Rat pushed up to his feet, moved a few steps away from us, then stopped and stood with his back turned. He was an emotional guy.