by Tobias Wolff
B.D. didn’t think he had killed anyone yet. His company had been ambushed three times and B.D. had fired back with everyone else, but always hysterically and in a kind of fog. Something happened to his vision; it turned yellow and blurry and he saw everything in a series of stuttering frames that he could never afterward remember clearly. He couldn’t be sure what had happened. But he thought he’d know if he had killed somebody, even if it was in darkness or behind cover where he couldn’t see the man go down. He was sure that he would know.
Only once did he remember having someone actually in his sights. This was during a sweep through an area that had been cleared of its population and declared a free-fire zone. Nobody was supposed to be there. All morning they worked their way upriver, searching empty hamlets along the bank. Nothing. Negative booby traps, negative snipers, negative mines. Zilch. But then, while they were eating lunch, B.D. saw something. He was on guard in the rear of the company when a man came out of the trees into an expanse of overgrown paddies. The man had a stick that he swung in front of him as he made his way with slow, halting steps toward the opposite tree line. B.D. kept still and watched him. The sun was warm on his back. The breeze blew across the paddies, bending the grass, rippling the water. Finally he raised his rifle and drew a bead on the man. He held him in his sights. He could have dropped him, easy as pie, but he decided that the man was blind. He let him go and said nothing about it. But later he wondered: What if he wasn’t blind? What if he was just a guy with a stick, taking his time? Either way, he had no business being there. B.D. felt funny about the whole thing. What if he was actually VC, what if he killed a bunch of Americans afterward? He could be VC even if he was blind; he could be cadre, infrastructure, some high official …
Blind people could do all kinds of things.
Once it got dark B.D. walked across the compound to one of the guard bunkers and palmed a grenade from an open crate while pretending to look for a man named Walcott.
He was about to leave when pumpkin-headed Captain Kroll appeared wheezing in the doorway. He had a normal enough body, maybe a little plump but nothing freakish, and then this incredible head. His head was so big that everyone in camp knew who he was and generally treated him with a tolerance he might not have enjoyed if his head had been a little smaller. “Captain Head,” they called him, or just “The Head.” He worked in battalion intelligence, which was good for a few laughs, and didn’t seem to realize just how big his head really was.
Captain Kroll crouched on the floor and had everyone bunch up around him; it was like a football huddle. B.D. saw no choice but to join in. Captain Kroll looked into each of their faces, and in a hushed voice he said that their reconnaissance patrols were reporting beaucoup troop movements all through the valley. They should maintain an extreme degree of alertness, he said. Mister Charles needed some scalps to show off in Paris. Mister Charles was looking for a party.
“Rock and roll!” said the guy behind B.D.
It was a dumbfuck thing to say. Nobody else said a word.
“Any questions?”
No questions.
Captain Kroll rolled his big head from side to side. “Get some,” he said.
Everyone broke out laughing.
Captain Kroll rocked back as if he’d been slapped, then stood and left the bunker. B.D. followed him outside and struck off in the opposite direction. The grenade knocked against his hip as he wandered, dull and thoughtless, across the compound. He didn’t know where he was going until he got there.
Lieutenant Puchinsky was drinking beer with a couple of other officers. B.D. stood in the doorway of the hooch. “Sir, it’s Biddy,” he said. “Biddy Sears.”
“Biddy?” Lieutenant Puchinsky leaned forward and squinted at him. “Christ. Biddy.” He put his can down.
They walked a little ways. Lieutenant Puchinsky gave off a certain ripeness, distinct but not rank, that B.D. had forgotten and now remembered and breathed in, taking comfort from it as he took comfort from the man’s bulk, the great looming mass of him.
Lieutenant Puchinsky stopped beside a cyclone fence enclosing a pit filled with crates. “You must be getting pretty short,” he said.
“Thirty-four and a wake-up.”
“I’m down to twenty.”
“Twenty. Jesus, sir. That’s all right. I could handle twenty.”
A flare burst over the dead space outside the wire. Both men shrank from the sudden brightness. The flare drifted slowly down, hissing as it fell, covering the camp with a cold green light in which everything took on a helpless, cringing aspect. They didn’t speak until it came to ground.
“Ours,” Lieutenant Puchinsky said.
“Yes, sir,” B.D. said, though he knew this might not be true.
Lieutenant Puchinsky shifted from foot to foot.
“It’s about Lieutenant Dixon, sir.”
“Oh, Christ. You’re not going to tell me you’re having trouble with Lieutenant Dixon.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Lieutenant Puchinsky asked if he’d gone through channels, B.D. knew he’d already lost his case. He tried to explain the situation but couldn’t find the right words, and Lieutenant Puchinsky kept interrupting to say that it wasn’t his outfit anymore. He wouldn’t even admit that an injustice had been done since Ryan had, after all, volunteered.
“Lieutenant Dixon made him,” B.D. said.
“How was that?”
“I can’t explain, sir. He has a way.”
Lieutenant Puchinsky didn’t say anything.
“We did what you wanted,” B.D. said. “We kept our part of the deal.”
“There weren’t any deals,” Lieutenant Puchinsky said. “It sounds to me like you’ve got a personal problem, soldier. If your mission requires personal problems, we’ll issue them to you. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you’re so worried about him, why don’t you volunteer?”
B.D. came to attention, snapped a furiously correct salute, and turned away.
“Hold up, Biddy.” Lieutenant Puchinsky walked over to him. “What do you expect me to do? Put yourself in my place—what am I supposed to do?”
“You could talk to him.”
“It won’t do any good, I can guarantee you that.” When B.D. didn’t answer, he said, “All right. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll talk to him.”
B.D. did feel better, but not for long.
He had trouble sleeping that night, and as he lay in the darkness, eyes open, a rusty taste in his mouth, the extent of his failure became clear to him. He knew exactly what would happen. Lieutenant Puchinsky thought he was going to talk to Lieutenant Dixon, and he would be loyal to this intention for maybe an hour or two, maybe even the rest of the night, and in the morning he’d forget it. He was an officer. Officers could look like men and talk like men, but when you drew the line they always went over to the officer side because that was what they were. Lieutenant Puchinsky had already decided that speaking to Lieutenant Dixon wouldn’t make any difference. And he was right. B.D. knew that. He understood that he had known it all along, that he’d gone to Lieutenant Puchinsky so he wouldn’t be able to deal with Lieutenant Dixon afterward. He’d tipped his hand because he was afraid to play it, and now the chance was gone. In another four or five days, the next time battalion sent down for an ambush party, Lieutenant Dixon would be out there asking for a volunteer, and Ryan would shoot off his mouth again.
And Lieutenant Puchinsky thought that he, B.D., should go out instead.
B.D. lay on his back for a while, then turned on his side. It was hot. Finally he got up and went to the doorway of the hooch. A new guy was sitting there in his boxer shorts, smoking a pipe. He nodded at B.D. but didn’t say anything. There was no breeze. B.D. stood in the doorway, then went back inside and sat on his bunk.
B.D. wasn’t brave. He knew that, as he knew other things about himself that he would not have believed a year ago. He would not have believed that he could walk p
ast begging children and feel nothing. He would not have believed that he could become a frequenter of prostitutes. He would not have believed that he could become a whiner or a shirker. He had been forced to surrender certain pictures of himself that had once given him pride and a serene sense of entitlement to his existence, but the one picture he had not given up, and which had become essential to him, was the picture of himself as a man who would do anything for a friend.
Anything meant anything. It could mean getting himself hurt or even killed. B.D. had some ideas as to how this might happen, acts of impulse like going after a wounded man, jumping on a grenade, other things he’d heard and read about, and in which he thought he recognized the possibilities of his own nature. But this was different.
In fact, B.D. could see a big difference. It was one thing to do something in the heat of the moment, another to think about it, accept it in advance. Anything meant anything, but B.D. never thought it would mean volunteering for an ambush party. He’d pulled that duty and hated it worse than anything. You had to lie out there all night without moving. When you thought a couple of hours had gone by, it turned out to be fifteen minutes. You couldn’t see a thing. You had to figure it all out with your ears, and every sound made you want to blow the whole place apart, but you couldn’t because then they’d know where you were. Then they had you. Or else some friendly unit heard the firing and got spooked and called down artillery. That happened once when B.D. was out; some guys freaked and shot the shit out of some bushes, and it wasn’t three minutes before the artillery started coming in. B.D. had been mortared but he’d never been under artillery before. Artillery was something else. Artillery was like the end of the world. It was a miracle he hadn’t gotten killed—a miracle. He didn’t know if he was up for that again. He just didn’t know.
B.D. rummaged in Ryan’s stuff for some cigarettes. He lit one and puffed it without inhaling, blowing the smoke over his head; he hated the smell of it. The men around him slept on, their bodies pale and vague under the mosquito-netting. B.D. ground the cigarette out and lay down again.
He didn’t know Ryan all that well, when you came right down to it. The things he knew about Ryan he could count on his fingers. Ryan was nineteen. He had four older sisters, no brothers, a girlfriend he never talked about. What he did like to talk about was driving up to New Hampshire with his buddies and fishing for trout. He was clumsy. He talked too much. He could eat anything, even gook food. He called the black guys Zulus but got along with them better than B.D., who claimed to be color-blind. His mother was dead. His father ran a hardware store and picked up the odd dollar singing nostalgic Irish songs at weddings and wakes. Ryan could do an imitation of his father singing that put B.D. right on the floor, every time. It was something he did with his eyebrows. Just thinking of it made B.D. laugh silently in the darkness.
Ryan was on a supply detail that weekend, completely routine, carrying ammunition forward from a dump in the rear, when a machine gun opened fire from a low hill that was supposed to be secure. It caught Ryan and several other men as they were humping crates across a mudfield. The whole area went on alert. Perimeter guards were blasting away at the hill. Officers kept running by, shouting different orders.
When B.D. heard about Ryan he left his position and took off running toward the LZ. There were two wounded men there, walking wounded, and a corpse in a bag, but Ryan was gone. He’d been lifted out with the other criticals a few minutes earlier. The medic on duty said that Ryan had taken a round just above the left eye, or maybe it was the right. He didn’t know how serious it was, whether the bullet had hit him straight on or from the side.
B.D. looked up at the sky, at the dark, low, eddying clouds. He was conscious of the other men, and he clenched his jaw to show that he was keeping a tight lid on his feelings, as he was. Years later he told all this to the woman he lived with and would later marry, offering it to her as something important to know about him—how this great friend of his, Ryan, had gotten hit, and how he’d run to be with him and found him gone. He described the scene in the clearing, the wounded men sitting on tree stumps, muddy, dumb with shock, and the dead man in his bag, not stretched out like someone asleep but all balled up in the middle. A big lump. He described the churned-up ground, the jumble of boxes and canisters. The dark sky. And Ryan gone, just like that. His best friend.
This story did not come easily to B.D. He hardly ever talked about the war except in generalities, and then in a grudging, edgy way. He didn’t want to sound like other men when they got on the subject, pulling a long face or laughing it off—striking a pose. He did not want to imply that he’d done more than he had done, or to say, as he believed, that he hadn’t done enough; that all he had done was stay alive. When he thought about those days, the life he’d led since—working his way through school, starting a business, being a good friend to his friends, nursing his mother for three months while she died of cancer—all this dropped away as if it were nothing, and he felt as he had felt then, weak, corrupt, and afraid.
So B.D. avoided the subject.
Still, he knew that his silence had become its own kind of pose, and that was why he told his girlfriend about Ryan. He wanted to be truthful with her. What a surprise, then, to have it all come out sounding like a lie. He couldn’t get it right, couldn’t put across what he had felt. He used the wrong words, words that somehow rang false, in sentimental cadences. The details sounded artful. His voice was halting and grave, self-aware, phony. It embarrassed him and he could see that it was embarrassing her, so he stopped. B.D. concluded that grief was impossible to describe.
But that was not why he failed. He failed because he had not felt grief that day, finding Ryan gone. He had felt delivered—set free. He couldn’t recognize it, let alone admit it, but that’s what it was, a strong, almost disabling sense of release. It took him by surprise but he fought it down, mastered it before he knew what it was, thinking it must be something else. He took charge of himself as necessity decreed. When the next chopper came in, B.D. helped the medic put the corpse and the wounded men on board, and then he went back to his position. It was starting to rain.
A doctor in Qui Nhon did what he could for Ryan and then tagged him for shipment to Japan. That night they loaded him onto a C-141 med evac bound for Yokota, from there to be taken to the hospital at Zama. The ride was rough at first because of driving winds and the steep, almost corkscrew turns the pilot had to make to avoid groundfire from around the airfield. The nurses crouched in the aisle, gripping the frames of the berths as the plane pitched and yawed. The lights flickered. IV bags swung from their hooks. Men cried out. In this way they spiraled upward until they gained the thin, cold, untroubled heights, and then the pilot set his course, and the men mostly quieted down, and the nurses went about their business.
One heard Ryan say something as she passed his cot. She knelt beside him and he said it again, a word she couldn’t make out. She took his pulse, monitored his breathing: shallow but regular. The dressing across his forehead and face was soaked through. She changed it, but had to leave the seeping compress on the wound; the orders on the chart specified that no one should touch it until he reached a certain team of doctors in Zama. When she’d finished with the dressing the nurse began to wipe his face. “Come on in,” Ryan said, and seized her hand.
It gave her a start. “What?” she said.
He didn’t speak again. She let him hold her hand until his grasp loosened, but when she tried to pull away he clamped down again. His lips moved soundlessly.
In the berth next to Ryan’s was a boy who’d had both feet blown off. He was asleep, or unconscious; she could see the rise and fall of his chest. His near hand was resting on the deck. She picked it up by the wrist, and when Ryan relaxed his grip again she gave him his neighbor’s hand and withdrew her own. He didn’t seem to know the difference. She wiped his face once more and went to help another nurse with a patient who kept trying to get up.
She wasn’t sure exac
tly when Ryan died. He was alive at one moment, and when she stopped by again, not so long afterward, he was gone. He still had the other boy’s hand. She stood there and looked at them. She couldn’t think what to do. Finally she went over to another nurse and took her aside. “I’m going to need a little something after all,” she said.
The other nurse looked around. “I don’t have any.”
“Beth,” she said. “Please.”
“Don’t ask, okay? You made me promise.”
“Look,” she said, “just this trip. It’s all right—really, Beth, I mean it. It’s all right.”
During a lull later on she stopped and leaned her forehead against a porthole. The sun was just above the horizon. The sky was clear, no clouds between her and the sea below, whose name she loved to hear the pilots say—the East China Sea. Through the crazed Plexiglas she could make out some small islands and the white glint of a ship in the apex of its wake. Someday she was going to take passage on one of those ships, by herself or maybe with some friends. Lie in the sun. Breathe the good air. Do nothing all day but eat and sleep and be clean, throw crumbs to the gulls and watch the dolphins play alongside, diving and then leaping high to show off for the people at the rail, for her and her friends. She could see the whole thing. When she closed her eyes she could see the whole thing, perfectly.
Powder
Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker. He’d had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him for sneaking me into a nightclub during his last visit, to see Thelonious Monk.
He wouldn’t give up. He promised, hand on heart, to take good care of me and have me home for dinner on Christmas Eve, and she relented. But as we were checking out of the lodge that morning it began to snow, and in this snow he observed some rare quality that made it necessary for us to get in one last run. We got in several last runs. He was indifferent to my fretting. Snow whirled around us in bitter, blinding squalls, hissing like sand, and still we skied. As the lift bore us to the peak yet again, my father looked at his watch and said, “Criminy. This’ll have to be a fast one.”
