The Ghosts of My Lai

by JC Braswell

  “What you saying, college boy?” Harris attempted to fashion a threat. It fell upon deaf ears. “You got something to say, Donnie?”

  “All I got to say is I got more women in the first two semesters of college than your scrawny ass ever will. And I didn’t pay for it. The amount of big, blonde—as you say—titties that I saw. Let me tell you, I buried my head in them like big old marshmallows.” Donovan smacked his lips together.

  “I hear them college girls are all right.” McEvoy, the perpetual nerd, hesitated, awkward in his mannerisms as he tried to join in. “I think I’d like to have me some of that.”

  “Shit. I doubt you can get into college. Don’t you want to make a career out of this? Didn’t your stupid ass volunteer?” Donovan adjusted the magazine on his belt.

  “Yeah,” McEvoy stuttered, looking at his platoon for approval. “Yes I did. Just like my daddy and my pops.”

  “And why would you do such a stupid thing like that?” Simmons harrumphed.

  “You know, I want to serve my country and all. That’s all. Have pride.”

  “Ain’t no pride in killing,” Jackson spoke up.

  “But there is pride in drilling.” Harris stuck his index finger through a circle he made with his other hand. “You get me? Soldier boy wants to wear fatigues because he can’t get snatch any other way.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Garcia joined in the fray. The banter created the illusion of old times again. The thought of their predicament was the furthest thing from their minds, including Williams, in those brief seconds. They were back in base camp, laughing and carrying on, if only for a moment.

  “There’s another one who doesn’t get it.” Simmons blew out a ring of smoke. “You volunteered, too. They promised you all that medical training and college. That’s the only way your poor ass could go to college. Ain’t it, Ernesto?”

  Garcia tightened his lips.

  “College is hard,” Donovan interrupted. “Believe me, I know. Fun, but hard.”

  “And he ain’t the only one who’s been to college. Ain’t that right, Lieutenant?”

  Williams unfastened his top button but made sure to keep his collar tucked in. He didn’t need another case of the creepy-crawlies. Not out here. Not now. Yet, the sound of the insects comforted him, reminding him of the blight of mosquitos during an Annapolis summer.

  “Yeah…college.” Williams barely recalled his time at Maryland. He had been too wrapped up in his romance with his soon-to-be-wife, skirting through his courses with a healthy diet of B’s. It didn’t matter in the long run. He already had a managerial job lined up at the local steel plant. “And look what college gets you.”

  “Herpes.” Donovan laughed. “From one of those Vietnamese whores.”

  “Exactly. Here, Garcia, help me up. I gotta piss. The rest of you, close your eyes and get some sleep. We move once that sun cracks through that line of trees.”

  “Just where do we move?” Anuska asked. He kept his eyes down and grizzled cheeks taut, slicing his knife through the wood.

  Williams knew the torment in Anuska’s soul. He was a kindred spirit, a man coming to terms with his own atrocity.

  “We’ll see where that stream takes us.” Williams grimaced, pulling his right leg up so as to avoid applying pressure. His wound felt like it would erupt as Garcia helped him up.

  “Is that so?” Anuska shredded his stick, chopping off the pointed tip. He nicked his thumb with the next slice. Blood filled in the wound, tricking down his wrist and into his fatigues. Anuska didn’t flinch. Slivers of bark flew off the stick as he returned to his task, staining the light wood underneath with blood.

  “Yeah, that is so.” Williams turned his head to the side. “We’ll get you home to those kids of yours.”

  “Do I?” Anuska asked. “Have kids?”

  “You always talk about them.”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care.” Another shaving flittered to the floor.

  “Dave, you showed me pictures. Belinda and Carl.” Williams wanted to comfort the man. Out of all the men in Charlie Company, Anuska was the most focused, the most family oriented. He bragged about his two kids more than other trivial matters. He was also the first to greet the children in the villages, treating them like they were his own. There was a genuinely kind air to him.

  Williams knew something had changed when he looked into Anuska’s eyes in the ‘copter shortly before being shot down. His pride was gone. The motivation, an idealism keeping him going in this brown-green land, vanished. He needed to bring Anuska back.

  “I don’t have any pictures.” Steel grated against wood.

  “Chris, why don’t we get you outside so we can all get some rest?” Garcia nudged Williams forward, glancing at Anuska.

  “Don’t have any pictures,” Anuska repeated, his head sinking lower.

  “Yeah.” Williams wrapped his arm around Garcia’s shoulder and ducked out of the wooden tent. Human stink surrendered to fungal tones. The jungle bathed in the storm’s remnants, still with the thick fog glowing from the moon breaking through the clouds above. It looked like one of those old black-and-white movie graveyards.

  “You doing ok, Chris?” Garcia asked. The two hobbled over to a discreet tree.

  “Not going to lie. I don’t think we know what we’re up against out here.” He scanned the dark greens and blacks of the feral growth, wondering where the beast slept, curious to know if the Viet Cong closed in around them. Which one would get them first.

  “Now’s not the time to lose faith. Think about it. We couldn’t have gone that far, just a little off course. Shit, they’ll send ’copters out to look for us soon enough.”

  “Have you heard a single blade? Have you heard anything?” Williams cringed as he accidently swiped his toe against the ground, disturbing the gash. “Nothing.”

  “They must have seen us crash. You don’t think they would just abandon us?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Keep your mind on what we can control. Whoever shot us down watched us crash. Makes me wonder why this place isn’t teeming with Cong by now. And what do we do? Get high.”

  “You’re ranking officer, Chris.”

  “Me?” Williams sighed. “Only because of a college degree.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You can put a stop to that.”

  “You really think I’m going to take that away from them? That’s suicide right now. They’ll call for my head.”

  “You need to be strong out here. Be smart. They’ll listen.”

  “They’re not dumb. Simmons, he knows the deal. He knows we’re damn near out of ammo.” Williams found his footing by the tendril-like roots and leaned against the tree. A tiny pocket of trickle started to douse the two.

  “Then we move. We try and find the rescue they send.”

  “They ain’t coming.”

  “Wait. What do you mean?” Garcia stopped, his eyes growing wide with concern. He had too much faith in the United States Army.

  “Think about it. Somebody is going to say something about what happened earlier today. And that ain’t going to be good. I’ve got a feeling that when it gets out they’re not going to want to find us. One of those buried secrets we don’t talk about.” Williams struggled to unzip his pants while balancing on one leg.

  “You’re serious…about them abandoning us.”

  “Who knows what they’ll do. At least we’re away from that devil.”

  “Don’t say that too loud. If Simmons or—”

  “I don’t give a shit if they love Medina.” Williams watched his piss stream glisten in the moonlight. The sharp aroma of urine thick with dehydration permeated the fog rolling along the area, moving as if it had a life unto itself. “I only have one concern now. That’s getting all of us out of here…alive.”

  “Good.”

  Williams looked up at the white bulb in the sky. The leaves shimmered from its silver glow.

  “We’ll get through it,” he lied, zipping up his pants. “Can’t be too far
off the beaten path. We’ll have to march the guys to death tomorrow, not literally, but hard.”

  Across the ravine, about twenty yards from their position, a sudden splash interrupted the drone of the midnight chorus. Williams immediately went for his Colt, Garcia following suit. If it was Viet Cong, they were already too late.

  About time, Williams thought.

  The pistol’s handle slipped in Williams’s palm as he removed it from his holster, almost dropping it to the ground. His lips quivered as he peered around the tree to the water below. The flooded stream ran angry. There was no sign of anything, not even the shadow of a forest creature.

  Garcia looked back at him, two fingers pointing forward. Williams waved him toward the makeshift shelter. The light from the lean-to would be a beacon for the Viet Cong, but at least Garcia would give the rest of them a fighting chance by alerting them.

  Garcia shrugged him off, securing his own sidearm with his other hand.

  Don’t be so damned stubborn.

  The water sloshed again, this time more violently, but there was nothing to be found, not even a hint of movement in the fog. Williams waved Garcia back to the tent again, adding a bit more emphasis.

  Garcia nodded in a way one would say a goodbye to a friend and turned. He finally realized seven men were more important than one.

  As Garcia scampered over, crouched down, deliberate in his movements, Williams focused back on the brook.

  Then he saw it. The glimmer of two golden spheres pulsated through the thickets where all creatures born from childhood imagination lived. It was coming for him, playing with him like a household cat would toy with a mouse. The beast’s shadow circled around his brothers’ carcasses. The orbs flashed once, then twice, before retreating back into its hunting grounds.

  “Ok. ” Williams propped his shoulder against the tree, his breaths shallow, sliding down its slick trunk until he huddled against an outcropping of roots. The dark plumes of wild vegetation closed in around him. He listened until all he heard was the constant thump of his heart—steady.

  Suddenly, the beast’s snarl nipped at the back of his ear, joined by the echo of thunder, almost ethereal in its existence as if it surrounded Williams. Its breath—warm and menacing—spilled down his neck. Williams repositioned his fingers around his pistol, shutting his eyes and holding his breath in a futile effort to calm his nerves. It would only take one shot.

  He opened his eyes back up and swung around, past the pain of his thigh to find a disturbed plant shaking back and forth but no sign of the tiger.

  “What?” He swallowed spit that wasn’t there, his eyes darting back and forth.

  A desperate cry that seemed to come from the jungle itself pulled his attention back to the water where a shadow slipped back to the untamed lands. The stream ran unabated as the tiger—or whatever beast stalked him—vanished, its hunger satiated. Williams wouldn’t face the beast; instead, he watched the slender profile of a mongoose slip through the moonlight and scamper across the stream.

  What? The cat was done toying with the mouse. He waited five minutes, listening to the steady drum of his heartbeat. It seemed like five hours.

  The tension in Williams’s muscles relaxed as he looked over at their shelter and slumped back down to the earth, his adrenaline having sapped the rest of his energy. It remained quiet, eight men waiting for an ambush that would never come.

  Williams’s eyes rolled up to the forest ceiling. He wondered if his unborn child could see the moon. He wondered if he would see her in the afterlife. Exhaustion took him as he slowly faded to oblivion.

  He dreamed that night for the first time since he arrived in Vietnam of a pink-yellow sky along across Annapolis’s harbor. His feet propped upon his father’s boat, looking out across the Chesapeake, a cool Miller at his side and a straw hat atop his head. A salt-laden breeze blew across his face, providing a temporary reprieve from the warm rays.

  He dreamed of laughter, laughter he’d heard before. The boat canted to the side as a silhouette danced across the bow. Williams removed his hands from behind his head and turned.

  A boy, roughly four years in age, stood beside the steering wheel. Brown sandals were strapped on his feet. A blue tank top and white swimming trunks completed his ensemble. Williams twirled his chair and looked closer. The child’s brown locks curled from under his baseball cap. He looked deeper into the gray.

  There was nothing. Maybe it was just a ghost.

  SIX

  “Chris,” McEvoy shouted.

  “What?” Williams woke from his dream, the image of the specter still in his mind.

  “Thought we’d lost you, but we didn’t want to, you know, given our situation and all.” McEvoy stood over him with a hand extended, his lips curled in a goofy manner. It was becoming a habit for him to wake up with one of the others standing over him.

  “Passed out?” He shook his head clear of cobwebs then looked down at the stream half-expecting to see the tiger’s paw prints embedded in the dark soil beside him.

  Simmons, Jackson, and the rest of the crew spread out across the area, more deliberate in their movements as they unfastened the lean-to and uttered a encyclopedia’s worth of obscenities.

  It stank worse than the night before, the air thicker with death and rot. The pores in his cheeks and nose felt heavy and clogged with mud. Humidity—nature’s way of reminding you she was still in charge—already claimed the day.

  The season was still early, but it reminded Williams of the kind of day where a mid-afternoon thundershower would pop up unannounced along the horizon—perfect conditions for a bout of crotch rot. Maybe it would provide the boys a reason to shower and capture some fresh water unlike the ill-tasting poison running through Vietnam’s stagnant pools.

  “Damn, LT. You look like Hades himself ran you over,” Jones’s drawl slowed to almost a stop. He slung his M-16 behind his bowling-ball shoulders. “You gonna be able to walk on that? Leg looks like—”

  Jones wasn’t afforded the opportunity to finish his thoughts. The bullet’s impact sounded like a butcher cleaving meat from bone. Jones’s ear and a chunk of his scalp split apart from his skull in a small eruption of blood and body fluids. Jones teetered a bit on one leg, his body rigid.

  Hemingway was right. There was no romance in war. There was no awesome movie scene where you fly backwards with a somersault, no excited screaming in a hailstorm of bullets. Jones simply collapsed sideways, his head shaking, his eyes wide in disbelief as he watched the last moments of his life fade to nothingness.

  “No,” Garcia shouted as Jones crashed beside him.

  Earth spat up around Williams as another volley of bullets tore into Jones’s carcass. Tiny geysers plumed up from Jones’s chest, spraying crimson liquid across his fatigues.

  “Get down,” Williams yelled. He raised his Colt, having held it in his hand the entire night, and aimed it opposite their position in a desperate attempt to ward off their attackers.

  Simmons and Harris, the two fortunate ones who happened to have rifles, returned a volley, orange sparks popping from black barrels of destruction.

  “Fuck you, you commie pricks. Come out and fight like a man, you pansy-ass, cock sucking faggots.” Simmons ran sideways, firing into the foliage with no obvious target—a wildman in his own right.

  Another smattering of bullets sailed through the air, splintering bark from trees and mutilating plants. Williams turned and saw their albatross. They ran with precision, zigzagging through trees with ease before disappearing into the scrub. The Viet Cong had the advantage. It was their home turf. They came fast, just like he thought they would.

  “Find some cover.” Williams rolled to his side, grimacing from the biting pain in his legs as he pulled back on the trigger, firing successive shots into nothingness.

  “Give me that damned grenade,” Donovan yelled as he ran up behind Jackson, who was too preoccupied with shoving another magazine into his clip. Donovan had the grace of a turtle as he toss
ed the metal ball into the air. He sprawled to the ground and covered his head.

  The Viet Cong shouted in their godforsaken language as the grenade hit its mark. The ground detonated in a spray of red, yellow, brown, and green earth, sending a flailing body into the air, head down and legs up. The soldier’s neck contorted in an unnatural way as it snapped against the ground.

  The bastard deserved as much.

  “Oh, Jesus.” McEvoy slid next to Garcia and Williams. “My rifle. It’s too far...too far.”

  “Get your ass up, geek.” Harris laughed. He stood beside Simmons, matching shot for shot with the enemy.

  “How many?” Garcia asked.

  “Who knows?” Williams answered. He remained calm, suppressing whatever fear welled up inside. This was the war he knew, the war he came for. Williams fired a couple more shots behind the smoking patch of ground before drawing back.

  “You think they’re sending a whole platoon this way?” McEvoy whined.

  “Doesn’t matter. Shoot as many as you can. Shoot until you don’t have any bullets.”

  Williams surveyed his troops. Everything happened too fast to comprehend. Garcia and McEvoy were beside him, using the tree as cover. Harris and Simmons were at the next small thicket of trees, sprawled on the ground, about five yards in front of Jones’s lifeless body. Donovan and Jackson remained huddled together, waiting for their moment.

  “Shit,” Williams shouted as he noticed another silhouette cut through the fog. It couldn’t be. “Anuska.”

  Dave Anuska sprinted down the ravine, his stilt-like legs carrying him forward with the grace of a gazelle, his feet barely touching the water as he crossed. His green fatigue jacket slid off his arms, his bare chest exposed to the world. He ran with a purpose, his eyes locked on his target.

  “Damn it. Garcia, cover me,” Williams said, holstering his gun.

  “Chris, don’t.”

  William stumbled to his feet toward his platoon-mate, hoping to cut him off. Another hailstorm of bullets rattled the ground at his side. His leg burned. His head spun. He kept focused on Anuska, ducking his head, hoping he wouldn’t be cut down by gunfire.