Saving Room for Dessert

by K. C. Constantine

  “You shot him?”

  “Yeah. He wouldn’t turn his track around, and he wouldn’t get outta the driver’s seat, so …”

  “So you shot him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh … dead?”

  “Yeah dead. He wouldn’t move. Kept hollerin’ he was only takin’ orders from the lieutenant, I kept tellin’ him the lieutenant was dead, he wouldn’t believe me, I tried pullin’ him outta the seat, he pulled his .45, told me to get away from him, meanwhile, we’re takin’ RPGs fast as they can load ’em, he’s wavin’ his .45 at me, then somethin’ hit the turret, I didn’t know what, but it made him turn around, take his eyes off me for a second and, uh, when he did I shot him. I mean, he might as well’ve been sittin’ there with both his tracks blown off—except they weren’t. And on both sides of us are all these rubber trees, I mean those APCs are powerful, but they couldn’t flatten trees thick as those rubber trees. So how were we supposed to get outta there if we didn’t move the last track in line? It was a narrow road. Couldn’t go around him.”

  “Well obviously you did get out.”

  “Yeah. But not right away. Not for six or seven hours we didn’t. We got turned, around, the ones that could move, eight of’em, but we only got, I don’t know, maybe eight hundred, nine hundred meters back that road and I guess we got hit with a hand grenade or maybe a satchel charge, I don’t know what, I just know we lost our right track, and then we were stuck again. And started takin’ fire. Broadside. I found out later, it was a small unit of VC, maybe twenty guys, maybe not that many, and for some reason, after they blew the track on our right, all they had was AKs. I mean, they didn’t have any rockets, which believe me … man, if they’d’ve had them, we would’ve been slaughtered. ’Cause the goofy thing, I mean, the NVA behind us? Who were the ones in front of us when they opened up? I mean we were only like a thousand meters from them. They should’ve been nailin us. But after the first couple seconds they never hit another one of us. Either we were farther away from them than I thought or else they must’ve used up all their RPGs in the first couple minutes. ’Cause after that it was just the ones on our right givin’ us hell, they had us pinned there for, I don’t know, hours. I took one in the arm, and then another one, it hit me in the helmet, bounced off my skull, knocked me out, for I don’t know how long. When I finally woke up, we were on our way back to the base camp. Which was really strange. We never did get any artillery support, and when we finally got air support, they were already cuttin’ out—that’s what I was told anyway. I mean … it was just all fucked up. Which was the way everything was there. But anyway for the most part, I was just, uh, you know, unconscious. But we really got shot up. I mean we weren’t at full strength by anybody’s count, but we started out with what was supposed to be a company, and there was only like, I don’t know, maybe thirty guys made it back in one piece.”

  “But if I understand you, the only time you were afraid was when you thought about shooting this driver, this Hog.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well if somebody wanted to make somethin’ of it, I mean, hey, that was murder. I mean even I knew that. In the army that’s a capital offense. They hang you.”

  “And that’s what you were afraid of? Hundreds of enemy soldiers firing at you for hours and that’s the only thing that frightened you, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. I knew I could get hung for that. And if I got hung I was never gonna be a cop.”

  “Are you being facetious?”

  “You mean am I jokin’? No. Uh-uh. That’s the way I used to think when I was there. See, let me explain somethin’. When I first got there, I knew that none of the training I went through back here, none of that was gonna make any difference. I mean it was all blanks, you know? There was only this one time they had us crawlin’ under barbed wire while they were firin’ live rounds over us with a couple machine guns, but even an idiot knew that as long as you kept your belly on the ground you weren’t gonna get hit. I mean, c’mon, they weren’t gonna kill any of us to prove a point, that’s ridiculous.

  “But I knew once I got over there, anybody shootin’ at me if they saw me crawlin’, they weren’t gonna be aimin’ two feet above my butt. So I made up my mind, I was gonna find the sharpest guy in my unit, the one who’d been there the longest and who everybody looked up to, and I was gonna follow him around like tan on sand till I learned everything he knew.”

  “So you didn’t consider, uh, the randomness of death in combat?”

  “Randomness? You mean luck?”

  “Yes. That no matter what you did, you couldn’t protect yourself from the, uh, utterly hit-or-miss aspect of life or death there.”

  “No. And I’m not stupid. I didn’t think I was immortal, or un-killable, or whatever. But the whole time I was flying over there, the whole way across the Pacific, I kept telling’ myself over and over, learn as much as you can as fast as you can, don’t be a hero, dig fast, keep your weapon clean. I know it sounds like so much bullshit, but that’s the way I thought. I wouldn’t allow myself to think that no matter what you did or didn’t do you could still get killed. That was too … I couldn’t live with that … I had to believe that I was gonna survive because of what I learned … and I knew that fear would keep me from learnin’ it.

  “I mean fear is fear, everybody’s afraid of something’. I mean the noise … Jesus, the noise of war, man, it’s … it’s unbelievable. But no matter what, the thing you can’t allow to happen is that you get so afraid you get paralyzed. ’Cause you … I mean, you get panicked, you get your heart bangin’ so hard you think it’s gonna bust right out your sternum, I mean, that is not the way to control your body. And you gotta control your body when you’re under that kinda … extreme stress like that. That’s what I learned from Jukey Johnson.”

  “The smartest man in your unit?”

  “Oh absolutely. Smartest, most observant, coolest, most experienced. We’d go on patrol, or go set up an ambush, he was always out front. I asked him why he did that. He was the platoon sergeant, senior NCO in the platoon, he didn’t have to do that. Half the time he was there he was our platoon leader. All those lieutenants, they didn’t last too long. But he said he didn’t trust anybody to see what he could see, or could hear, or could smell, or just, you know, sense it. That’s why he was out front. So I just attached myself to his back. He didn’t like it at first, didn’t trust me at all. But that was his third tour there, I mean I never met anybody else had been there more than two. Only him.”

  “So was he a lover of war? Combat? Death? Killing? A seeker of extreme stimulation? A stimulation addict perhaps?”

  “That’s a dumb question.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “’Cause that’s what I asked him, and that’s what he said to me.”

  “Surely he said something else to justify himself. Or to explain himself, to rationalize his behavior.”

  “Well, among other things, he was from Mississippi. Same town where they killed those three Freedom Riders, remember? Those two Jewish kids and that colored kid?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well he said the army was the only place where crackers had to treat him with respect because of his rank and the ribbons on his chest. He’d been in fourteen years and was on his third tour in Nam when I met him—I said that before, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Plus, he’d done somethin’ like seven, eight months in Korea before the armistice got signed there, so he’d seen a lotta shit hittin’ a lotta fans, and when he finally started trustin’ me, he told me everything. Said I was the first cracker he ever trusted. Last two months he was there, we used to take turns on point, that’s how much he trusted me.”

  “And you thought what he told you would keep you alive.”

  “It did.”

  “If you think it did, then I suppose it did.”

  “There’s no supposin’ about it.
It did.”

  “It’s not for me to say whether your beliefs were founded in reality. If you believed they were real, then for you they were.”

  “What you’re sayin’ is there’s a difference between what’s real and what we perceive as real. Lotta people say that, even Balzic says that.”

  “Oh I’m sure he does.”

  “Well I can’t argue that. Except when I was there. I’ll argue that till the day I die about what I learned from Jukey Johnson.”

  “Listen, James, it’s not my function here to be purposely contentious, but the fact is I served in the marines in World War Two. I was on Okinawa. Went ashore in the third wave, and when it was over I walked up the ship’s ladder under my own power. I have no idea how I survived. Nearest I came to being wounded was that I nearly lost my toes from foot rot. But my perception of that reality on that island for those who fell all around me is that death or mutilation in modern warfare is absolutely random. It has not the slightest rationality to it. No amount of study or wisdom or insight or intuition will keep you alive if you happen to be standing where the bullets are flying or the shells are exploding. It’s simple physics, understandable to the average high school kid, but how those physics are applied, why one man dies, another loses both arms, another his eyes, another goes insane, and yet another doesn’t suffer a scratch—it’s totally irrational.”

  “Yeah, okay. I get what you’re sayin’, but see, I told you before, I couldn’t let myself believe that. I would never’ve lasted a week if I’d let myself believe that. I would’ve been … I mean, I would’ve been paralyzed with fear. I don’t know how many times I saw it happen. The first day, when I got dropped off in my unit’s base camp, it was at a place called Cu Chi, and right after I got off the chopper, I could hear these boom boom, and then again two more, boom boom, and then a couple seconds later three more, and this guy, he was walkin’ toward me, when he heard the first two he just dropped, right into this big puddle, and he just curled up and started cryin’. And they were way off, these noises, I could see the smoke from them, but they were at least a couple hundred meters from us, way out there. But this guy was just a pile of clothes in the middle of a puddle.

  “And this colored guy walked up, asked me for my orders, and when I tried to hand ’em over, I had to wait till he pulled this guy to his feet and then he looked at my orders and told me to help him take this guy to the aid station, and then he took me back to his area and introduced me as an FNG. But I’ll never forget the way this colored guy was lookin’ at everything, his eyes, they never stopped movin’, they were constantly scannin’ everything, me, everything behind me, the guy in the puddle, I said to myself, hey, this guy knows somethin’. And I found out real soon, sure enough, he knew everything, man. And I mean everything.”

  “So he survived. And you did too by learning what he knew. So you think that, uh, you perceived that as the way you survived.”

  “No. He didn’t survive. I mean he survived Nam. But after his tour was over, he went on leave back to Mississippi, and some cracker ran him down with a truck, broke both his legs, crushed his pelvis, broke coupla vertebra in his lower back. He’s in a wheelchair. I mean, he survived, he’s alive. But he can’t walk.”

  “You stay in touch with him?”

  “Try to. Call him every month or so, see how it’s goin’. That wasn’t random either.”

  “Excuse me? How so?”

  “This cracker thought he was with some civil rights workers. Thought he was there to stir up some trouble, you know, it was like two, three weeks after Martin Luther King got shot. But he just happened to pick that time to take his leave, that’s all. Fact was, those civil rights workers, I mean, they were bustin’ his balls about bein’ in the man’s army, over there killin’ his Vietnamese brothers and all that crap. So this cracker sees him talkin’ to those people, he’s in civvies, cracker must’ve figured he’s one of them. And first chance he gets he runs him down.”

  “And you don’t think that was random?”

  “No, I think that’s absolutely logical. ’Cause he told me, Jukey, straight out, he said arguin’ with those civil rights kids, when they started trashin’ him to his face, that distracted him. Made him forget where he was—just long enough to get hurt—I mean he said he forgot that he was in Mississippi and there were people there wanted to hurt him just as much as if he was in Nam. But it would’ve never happened to him in Nam, ’cause he expected Victor Charlie to be anywhere and everywhere. He’d’ve been in Nam he would’ve smelled that cracker comin’ fifty meters away, believe it.”

  “How do you explain that the man in the truck singled him out? You don’t think that was random? Why didn’t he crash his truck into all of them while they were arguing?”

  “You’d have to ask him. So okay, 1 guess, alright, you could make the case that was bad luck. But I keep tellin’ you, I couldn’t let myself think like that. I would never have been able to move if I’d let my mind get full of thoughts like that. I saw guys, I mean, they’d get under a mortar attack, be fine for a while, then just stand up, start screamin’. Guaranteed dust-off time, physical or mental, one or the other. And you can’t tell me one’s any better than the other. They’re just different, that’s all.”

  “Psychological death is the same as physical death?”

  “Hey, I went to see this guy in the VA hospital in Pittsburgh, you know, the one off Washington Boulevard there?”

  “I know where it is. Three days a week, I work there.”

  “Oh. Well, anyway, I heard this guy was there. He was a good guy. I got to know him better than most, maybe ’cause he was from Pittsburgh. But he was an okay dude. Funny. Reliable. Always did what he was supposed to. Nobody had to tell him anything twice— for about eleven months. Then he got short. Thirty days. All of a sudden, he just couldn’t stand the thought that he’d get dusted off when he was that close to goin’ home. I mean, he just got that thought in his mind, and, man, he was finished. Paralyzed. I mean literally. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t brush his teeth, couldn’t do anything. Finally, I didn’t have any choice, I had to take him to the aid station, and the dude just wigged out there, man. Went after a medic with a scalpel. We finally got him in a jacket, they shot him full of morphine, MPs put him on a plane back. And he’s been in the hospital ever since. When I went to see him, he didn’t know me from a cheeseburger. His mind was alphabet soup. He’s never gonna get outta there.”

  “And you equate that with being dead?”

  “He’s breathin’, but if you call that livin’, forget it.”

  “And you think this is because he let himself think wrong.”

  “No question. Why was he fine for eleven months? Suddenly he gets short, I mean, hey, if you last long enough to get short, you’re gonna get the short-timer’s attitude. Everybody does. I had it too. But it just exaggerated everything I knew, just made me double my concentration on what I was doin’ and how I had to do it. Jukey used to say, emotion starts with a thought, and fear starts with a wrong thought. I refused to let myself think wrong.”

  “Yet you came out of your vehicle and used your baton like a lance. Rammed it into a man’s kidney without identifying yourself as a police officer, without—according to the report I read—without so much as one word of warning.”

  “Uh … you got me there, what can I say?”

  “I don’t want to have you anywhere, James. I want you to tell me, and I especially want you to tell yourself—what you were thinking at that moment—that’s why you’re here. This is the wall we run into every time we get to this point. How many times have we been over this, is that your question? How many times have you been here? And how many times have you refused to answer when I ask you why you didn’t identify yourself?”

  “I wanted him … I wanted him to know… I was thinking I wanted him to know what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that.”

  “Oh come on, James, you aren’t Superman, it’s not your job to go around avenging
injustice, delivering retribution on behalf of the downtrodden. Life is not a comic book. You took an oath to serve and protect. You took all the courses, passed all the tests, passed your probationary period with exemplary behavior, got outstanding fitness reports from all your teachers, all your training partners. I’ve read your records a dozen times. Then suddenly you see a father beating a son, and you forget how to speak? Suddenly you can’t summon the brainpower to identify yourself as a police officer? Suddenly you can’t remember the word freeze? Suddenly you find yourself with only one possible option to stop this beating? Suddenly the only way you know how to stop this beating is to take your baton and, without one word of warning, ram it into this man’s back and rupture his kidney? Are you seriously asking me to believe that’s what happened here? This, from a man who endured twelve months in Vietnam under the extreme stress of guerrilla warfare, who survived that warfare by controlling his mind, by refusing to allow himself to think a wrong thought? This man—you—you’re trying to tell me now, that when you put your hands on that baton, that was your thought process?”

  “Pretty stupid, huh?”

  “No, James. Not stupid. Intelligence is not the issue here. Evasion is the issue here.”

  “You tellin’ me I’m supposed to know why I was thinkin’ that way? I thought you were the one supposed to do that.”

  “James, please, everything you’ve told me so far tells me you cal culate everything you do. We’ve been going at this now for how many months? Eleven?”

  “Yeah. Next report I write for Balzic will be number eleven.”

  “And how many times have we been over what you learned from Jukey Johnson?”

  “I don’t know, fourth, fifth, it’s all startin’ to, uh, blend in, run together, one session sounds, looks, I don’t know, like the rest.”