by Chris Lynch
There is a saying here, from Mao Tse-tung, that goes something like: “The People are the sea that the guerrilla fish swim in.”
How do you kill the guerrilla fish without cutting through the sea?
This is one reason for the free-fire zones. I am pleased to hear about the free-fire zones. They help address the chaos.
Free-fire zones are areas where any unidentified person who moves within that area can be considered a hostile and can be dealt with summarily. Things used to be tighter than that. Free-fire zones used to be close around base camps, airfields, and the like.
That was before. That was before we saw how the sea was supporting the guerrilla fish.
Now there are curfews and there are patrols and there are general rules for the people to follow.
Or not. It’s up to them.
In the middle of this chaos, I am glad I only have basically one job.
And I get better at it every day.
Another of the boundaries falling for us is the one between day and night.
When recon comes in with some useful information about the movement of men and equipment along trails, we are on top of it. Sometimes that intelligence says that there is a small block of time, just before dawn or just after sunset, when the enemy is using the path. It is our job to be there well ahead of time, and wait.
This is when the starlight scope becomes the most amazing tool in the whole arsenal: at night. If you need to kill in total darkness from a great distance, the starlight is king. But with the right information you can kill just fine with a number of other tools, usually the trusty M-16 and the M-60 machine gun.
But before you even get to use the tools, you have to be able to use yourself.
“Wake up,” Parrish says close to my ear.
I’ve been sleeping, but that’s okay. We are deep into the jungle about two miles inland from the river, split up into teams of two. We have been here all night, in holes we dug ourselves that you couldn’t even call foxholes unless you know foxes that stand upright and are about six feet tall. We are only feet from the trail marked off by the recon guys as a highway of VC during the wee, small, darkest hours. We take shifts: one hour sleeping, one hour watching for the enemy.
I hope they come soon, as the hole is filling with seeping, creeping water, like when you dig a hole out on a sandbar at low tide.
Only the sandbar wouldn’t have leeches.
“You want me to get that?” Parrish asks calmly.
“If you don’t mind,” I say, tipping my head away so he can pluck the fat ooze of a creature off my neck. The leeches here are what you would get if you took a normal sea snail, pulled it out of its shell, then force-pumped it full of a half a jar of peanut butter, then put it in the refrigerator for six hours before letting it stick itself to some part of your body.
If only we could turn the mosquitoes on the leeches.
“Don’t slap them,” he says, angrily whispering. “You can hear a slap for miles. Brush, don’t slap.”
I brush, and brush and brush. Parrish settles in for his hour.
The other guys are placed twenty yards up and twenty yards back of us along the same trail.
I can feel the sleep of Cpl. Parrish’s body against me almost instantly. One thing I am noticing is how tired tired can be here, and how pretty much every soldier I know has developed a knack for going from conscious to un without any in-between time necessary.
I wish I could do that right now.
I am fighting sleep as the night moves toward its conclusion. I am feeling the wetness of my boots, the sloggy dampness of my feet competing with the sweaty dampness of my mosquito-meat face in a game of ultimate grossness in which I am the only loser.
I think, for one of the rare moments I’ve allowed myself, of home.
You were never supposed to ice-skate on Jamaica Pond. The ice was unreliable, even in the deepest of deep freezes of January and February. You could skate and skate and skate, play some hockey, even, for hours, and everything would be cool, and then bang, a long and metal-timber cracking sound would cut right through everything, echo everywhere, and then you would know to turn on the jets and get to the bank.
There was nothing on earth more bone-chilling than sticking an arm into that water through a hole in that ice in the dead-winter months. When the Northeast had been under a relentless coldness and we were bored and stupid enough to have a frozen-arm endurance competition. Layers on layers of clothes just made it worse, the big clunky sweaters, the jackets getting heavier every second ’til it felt like you were hanging in a frozen meat locker and wearing a refrigerator for a sleeve. I always won, of course, but it only took about eight seconds to do so and all afternoon to get feeling back in the hand.
Rudi was never any good at skating. No surprise, really. The other guys were good, I was National Hockey League–level great, but Rudi just never got the hang of it. It was painful to watch him, even, his ankles bent inward in a completely unnatural, inhuman way and somehow carrying all of his weight. He never enjoyed even one minute of it, but he insisted that he was going skating any time we were going, whether it was the legitimate, pay-an-entrance-fee kind of skating at Kelly Rink on the Jamaicaway, or the kind we preferred, which was free and fun and forbidden on the Pond.
Until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I banned him entirely from skating. And then he defied me and came the next time anyway, and I was forced to steal his shoes so he had to walk all the way home like a newborn colt with two missing legs, slipping and sliding the whole way and even getting a stress fracture in one ankle.
But he was there again the next time. When we pushed our luck into March, into a freak cold snap that made a St. Patrick’s Day skate amid the greenery of the Pond area seem like a perfectly clever idea, Rudi was there. Beck and Morris were there, too, but probably doing pirouettes and stuff near the shore when I dropped through the dead-center ice of the Pond.
“Iv — !”
I only heard the first syllable of the first screaming of my name from Rudi before I went under and the water froze my ears the way scientists turn things to bone china by dipping them in liquid nitrogen.
I fought my way to the surface and heard myself gasp. I was not panicking, not kicking wildly and clawing and flailing like the morons who wind up dead always did. But I wasn’t getting anywhere, either. I saw Morris and Beck hurrying over from the far bank. But directly in front of me, Rockin’ Rudi barreled my way.
His black snap-buckle overboots were clearly coming undone as he ran with abandon and foolishness, wasting loads of energy on the way.
“Stay away!” I screamed at him.
Slipping and spinning, he put everything he had into ignoring me. Then bam, he was down, his cheekbone making a sad pop as it bounced off the ice.
I was trying madly to pull myself up onto the ice, which was crumbling on me like a sheet of milky graham crackers.
“Rudi, man, stop!” I shouted as he got to his feet again. I could see from twenty feet the big pink welt and the panic sitting together on his stupid mug.
Morris and Beck skated up as close as they dared and put the breaks on as sharp as they could.
Rudi had his version of a head of steam up again and disregarded all screams from everyone now as he closed in, took a completely involuntary header, and flew across the ice.
Straight to me.
Straight into me.
The top of his capless head banged straight into my nose and I went back under the water. He came under with me, hanging on and following me down a couple feet into the black deep freeze.
Until we stopped short. I kicked and clawed my way, trying for the surface edge and for life, as I felt my strength melting to near uselessness. I felt heavier, colder, weaker than at any other time ever, and I was almost prepared to not do anything more about it. For one of the only times in my life, giving up made a tiny bit of sense.
When a tug, then a tug, then a heave-ho, had me breaking the surface of the water li
ke an arctic seal. Bobbing there for a second, I looked to see Morris and Beck sitting on their rear ends, the heels of their skate blades dug into the ice. Each one had a grip on one of Rudi’s legs.
Rudi’s dumb, drenched face was right in front of me. He looked like he might be crying, even, though I guess his expression had just frozen on whatever stupid thought he’d had when he went under. He’d been dipped into the water from his head to his hips.
After a few more heaves and hos, the team had me out of the water. It took a while as I split the ice like a frozen Moses for about thirty feet before we hit a spot thick enough to hold. We had been in a lot more danger in a lot more thin spots than we’d realized, and that pretty much ended our faith in St. Patrick’s help from that time on.
“Thanks,” I said as we crawled our way to the safety of the bank. “But, you know, I would have saved myself soon enough anyway. But, y’know, thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Rudi said with enough beaming pride to make us all toasty warm right there. He was sitting flat on his backside with his paws in front of him, just like a bear does.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said, knee-walking straight over and punching him right in the forehead. It wasn’t a real punch, just enough. “That was a really stupid thing to do. When we went under, I was actually trying to drown you. Only reason I didn’t was I couldn’t figure out how without killing myself at the same time.”
He was lying on his back now, staring up at the snowy gray sky and smiling like a simp.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “I saved you, Ivan. And I don’t feel stupid at all.”
I never would have let him get away with that, ordinarily. But it was cold, my hands were stiff, my feet were numb, and it was getting too dark to fight about it.
I am wondering if Rudi would have finally learned to skate right if I’d let him go to Canada, when I notice it’s getting too light for the Vietcong to try this trail now. My feet feel like what I imagine the roots of a mangrove feel like.
“Parrish,” I say, waking him up with a gradually building shake. “Corporal Parrish, I don’t think there will be any action here today.”
He blinks at me about fifty times before it’s clear he is back in the land of the living-ish. Over his shoulder, I see Lt. Systrom and Pvt. Arguello trudging our way. As they get near, Lt. Systrom signals to us to get on down the road, back the way we’d come, toward the other guys we will collect along the way.
It takes about a minute, and we stop in our tracks.
Parrish and I simultaneously suck in breath that could bleed all the oxygen out of this whole forest. Arguello just about walks right up my back. Systrom steps around us and walks right up to them.
Cpl. Lightfoot and Pvt. Kuns are still in their hole, semi-upright. Their torsos are forward but their heads are thrown back. Their throats have been cut wide open sometime during the night. It looks like they have huge, gaping mouths, howling or laughing out waterfalls of blood, right in the middle of their necks.
“Don’t just stand there,” Systrom says calmly.
What a stupid thing to say. Anything else, any other reaction in the whole world, would be the stupid thing to do right now, because just standing here is the exact right and only thing to do.
“Arguello,” Systrom snaps, hisses. “Get over here with that radio. Now.”
Pvt. Arguello walks, half stooped over, to where the lieutenant is standing, and turns his back to the whole scene. He has the radio mounted on his back. Systrom is calling in details.
“Parrish, Bucyk, get over here,” Systrom says between exchanges with the base. “Get them up and taken care of.”
We sling our weapons over our backs and slither over there. We drop down, and we each take a fallen comrade.
I grab Lightfoot by his shoulders … then I just drop him again when his head bends even farther back. I shake and retch and try again and pull my hands back. I feel like I am tearing farther, actually tearing the flesh of his neck where it is still attached.
Systrom finishes at the radio, shoves me aside, and jumps into the hole with Lightfoot. I roll onto my side and watch as he picks up my friend. Picks him up, cradles him, balances that precarious neck of a very good man in the crook of his left elbow. He talks to him, nose to nose. I don’t hear what he is saying. It’s between them.
Machine-gun fire explodes all over the jungle, and I can hear the bullets shredding the foliage all around us. We have been ambushed, and it seems to come from every direction.
I leap down to join Systrom in the dead men’s hole while Arguello and Parrish haul it back up to the hole I spent the night in. Bullets follow them all the way up until they drop like torpedoes straight down into the ground. Diving headfirst they seem as likely to have broken their necks as gotten shot.
The incoming is so heavy that there’s not a chance in the world for us to shoot back. The few times I manage to get the muzzle of my gun and my own muzzle above the lip of the hole, all I can see is a tripling of ricochet, and the bodies of our men jiggering and juddering as they die for us again, again, and again.
The lieutenant had called in the coordinates for helicopters to collect us in the nearest clearing about two klicks away. Even if we could get out of the ground, there is no way we could get there now.
“Corporal Parrish will be calling in the firepower now, private,” Systrom says. “You hang in there, and we will be able to wait it out.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, though I am not too sure about that at all. I have been scared before, and I have been doubtful, but at no point so far in this whole mad mother tea party have I felt what I feel right now, and that is that this is it.
This feels like it.
Suddenly, somehow, it all gets worse. Rockets, grenades, beehive shells start exploding all around and I see shrapnel flying right past, like darts embedding themselves in the ground right near us.
Then the throat-choking sound of chopper blades, three, maybe four gunships, and I wonder how all of a sudden our little band of nobodies got so important to the enemy.
“Where’d they get all this firepower?” I ask Systrom desperately.
“It’s ours,” he says, shouting freely now as hell rains all over us. “But it’ll kill you just as quick.”
And with that, Lt. Systrom shoots up out of the hole, grabs hold of Kuns’s shredded, oozing corpse, and pulls it down over himself like a trapdoor spider.
“Sir!” I scream in horror.
“These men are dead, private. Do you wish to join them?”
A large-caliber bullet pumps the earth right by my ear.
I leap up, grab Lightfoot, and stuff him right down on top of me, squeezing him in the process, forcing gasses and fluids out of a hundred punctures, out of him and over me.
The most hellacious firefight I have heard yet rages on above us, as we cling to the lifeless for life and I beg a thousand times over for forgiveness from Lightfoot and his great Great Spirit.
It is, probably, two hours before the only sound we hear is the choppers. Lt. Systrom and I slowly push our way out, lay the men down yet again, and stand with some difficulty. We walk up to the other hole to check on Parrish and Arguello, and when we near them, we hear Parrish communicating with the choppers. There is no place else for them to collect us, so we still have to make our way to that clearing two kilometers away.
We reach the hole and look down at Parrish, finishing the message, talking from underneath the dead man with the radio on his back.
Three men up, three men down, and a long, heavy walk to the choppers.
I don’t believe in paying any attention to dreams. I don’t believe in spirits or spooks or visions or mumbo jumbo of any kind.
Including this. Including mine.
I am looking straight into the face of Cpl. Lightfoot, my friend, which actually did happen, and he is dead, which he actually is.
Then his mouth drops open. We’re facing each other, up close, and both of our mouths are wide
open because, trust me, if a dead guy’s mouth falls open in your face, yours does, too.
There is a breath, a last breath, an escape of the body gasses that build up inside as the tissue starts decaying and whatnot. Not shocking, I guess, medically speaking, but, you know … shocking.
But it’s the spores. That is what tips it over into another thing, a thing that gets to me more than perhaps a soldier should be gotten to. The breath he puffs out in my direction is visible, like a cloud made up of tiny, tiny droplets of his blood, a mist of his blood, and I gasp, because trust me on this again, when a dead guy breathes up a cloud of blood spore, you gasp.
And so it winds up inside me, doesn’t it? I breathed it all in, and I can feel it.
What’s that all about?
There are reports all the time. Reports of guys doing their tours, hitting their almighty DERUS dates, and rotating out of here. They arrive back into society somehow unfit for society. Like, nuts beyond nuts, unable to readjust to a place where sneaking around and killing everybody and everything — you should see guys around here when they get turned loose on thickets with a machete — is just not the way things work.
I say, the guys who are loony tunes are the ones who got things exactly right while they were here. If you are here, it makes complete sense. There are, as far as I can tell, three ways guys get through the experience of Vietnam.
You can keep moving. The machine is built so that, if you want to, you can spend your whole twelve months in a state of constant motion, fake-fighting, passing through the war like a disinterested tourist.
You can acknowledge the reality of the situation, realize how close you are to horror every single day, and blow your mind out in a frenzy of nonstop nerve-racking.
Or, you can snap it. Like when you snap an ammonia capsule under the nose of a guy who is losing consciousness, and he comes popping out of it like some whole new creature with a whole new look. When you snap it here, you suddenly say, it’s not really real at all, not the way they think it is. What is really real is, I am death. I am death walking through this thing, and so I can’t possibly die.
