The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  “Virgil said it's your story to tell. He said it proves you didn't kill Crystal Hagen.”

  Carl sank back into his wheelchair. He put his fingers to his lips, his hand trembling slightly. There was another story; I could see that now, so I pressed on. “You said you'd tell me the truth Carl. It can't be the truth unless it's the whole story. I want to know everything.”

  Once again, Carl looked past the window, past the snow, and past the apartment balconies. “I'll tell you about Vietnam,” he said. “You can decide what it proves or doesn't prove. But I promise you, it will be the truth.”

  For the next two hours I didn't speak; I barely breathed. I listened to Carl Iverson go back in his memory—back to Vietnam. When he had finished, I stood, shook his hand, and thanked him. Then I went home and wrote that part of Carl Iverson's story that marked the turning point of his life.

  Joe Talbert

  English 317

  Biography: Turning point assignment

  On 23 September, 1967, Pfc. Carl Iverson stepped foot on foreign soil for the first time in his life, stepping off the Lockheed C-141 troop transport in Da Nang, Republic of Vietnam. In a temporary barrack used to house replacement troops, he met another FNG—Fucking New Guy—by the name of Virgil Gray from Baudette, Minnesota. With Carl hailing from South St. Paul, they were practically neighbors, never mind that the distance between Baudette and South St. Paul was the equivalent of driving through six states on the east coast. As luck would have it, they were assigned to the same platoon and sent to the same fire base, a dusty hilltop with the aesthetics of a baboon's ass, on the northwest edge of the Que Son Valley.

  Carl's squad leader, a short, foul–mouthed E-6 named Gibbs hid some serious psychological scars behind a mask of cruelty. He seethed with contempt for officers and enlisted men alike, criticizing orders and treating FNGs like plague-carrying rats. He reserved the brunt of his brutality for the Vietnamese: the gooks. They were the source of all things bad in Gibbs's world, and the half measures taken by the brass toward their eradication picked at Gibbs.

  When Carl and Virgil arrived at their new home, Gibbs took them aside to explain that President Johnson's war of attrition meant that “we had to kill more of them than they could kill of us.” It was a strategy that relied upon body counts. The generals winked at the colonels, who gave a nudge to the majors and the captains, who whispered to the lieutenants, who gave a nod to the sergeants, who, in turn, gave standing orders to the grunts. “If you see a gook running away,” Gibbs said, “they're either VC or a VC sympathizer. Either way, don't stand there with your dick in your hand. You shoot the little bastard.”

  After four months in country Carl had seen enough war to last a lifetime. He'd set up ambushes, watched VC soldiers dissolve into a vapor of blood when he clicked the detonator of a Claymore mine, and held the hand of a guy, whose name he didn't know, as the man cried out his last breath, his legs ripped away from his waist by a Bouncing Betty. Carl had grown used to the constant buzz of mosquitoes, but not the random mortars that Charlie liked to throw at them in the middle of the night. He celebrated his first snowless Christmas crawling down the throat of a spider hole.

  The crack in Carl Iverson's world, one that would cause him to want to die in Vietnam, began on a peaceful winter morning in early February 1968. Light clouds covered the horizon in advance of the sunrise, the stillness of the surrounding valley belying the ugliness of coming events. The brilliance of that sky reminded Carl of a morning he'd spent at his grandfather's cabin in the north woods, a morning long ago when the notion of killing or being killed held no place in Carl's life.

  The fighting had weighed Carl down, made him feel old. He leaned back against a pile of sandbags, tossed a cigarette butt into a shell casing the size of a thermos, lit another cigarette, and watched the sunrise.

  “Hey, Hoss,” Virgil said as he tromped down the dirt path.

  “Hey, Virg.” Carl kept his eyes on the horizon, watching the amber slowly sift out of the sky.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

  “Lake Ada.”

  “Come again?”

  “I saw that same sunrise coming up over Lake Ada when I was sixteen. I was sittin’ on the back porch of my grandpa's cabin. I swear it was the same red sky.”

  “You're a long ways from Lake Ada, Hoss.”

  “Roger that. In every way possible.”

  Virgil sat down next to Carl. “Don't let it get to you, man. We're wheels up in eight months. That's gonna be no time. Then we're outta here. We'll be di di mau.”

  Carl settled back on his sandbags and took a drag off his cigarette. “Can't you feel it, Virg? Can't you feel things slipping?”

  “Feel what slipping, Hoss?”

  “I don't know how to explain it,” Carl said. “It's like every time I go into that jungle I feel like I'm standing on a line, a line I know I shouldn't cross. And there's this screaming in my head, like some banshee whirling around me, pulling me, taunting me to step over that line. I know if I cross it, I become Gibbs. I'd say fuck ’em, they're just gooks, so fuck ’em all.”

  “Yeah,” Virgil said. “I know. I feel it, too. The day Levitz bought the farm, I wanted to lay waste to every butter head in the province.”

  “Levitz?”

  “The guy that got cut in half by that Betty.”

  “Oh…that was his name? I didn't know.”

  “But Hoss, once you go there you don't come back,” Virgil said. “That sixteen-year-old kid on Grandpa's porch, watching the sunrise, won't be there no more.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if he's there now.”

  Virgil turned his face so that Carl could see the seriousness in his eyes. “We don't have a vote on being here,” Virgil said, “and for the most part we don't have a vote on how we leave. But we do have control of how much of our soul we leave behind in this mess. Don't ever forget that. We do still have some choices.”

  Carl held out his hand, and Virgil gripped it tightly. “You got that right partner,” Carl said. “We need to get outta here with our shit intact.”

  “That's all we need to do,” Virgil said.

  Another pair of boots kicked down the path from the latrine toward their pile of sandbags. “Hey guys,” hollered Tater Davis.

  Davis, a true Tennessee volunteer, had joined the company just after Christmas and had attached himself to Virgil like an orphaned duck. A little fellow, Tater had peach skin blotted with freckles and ears that stuck out on the side of his face like one of those Mr. Potato Head toys. His parents had named him Ricky, but Virgil called him Potato Head. It stuck throughout the platoon, until one day when Ricky held his ground in a bad firefight, after that he became simply Tater.

  “Cap'n say we're fixin’ to di di soon,” he said.

  “Don't worry, Tater, they won't leave without you,” Carl said.

  “Yeah,” Virgil added, “Cap knows they can't win the war without you.”

  Tater grinned a goofy, high-cheeked smile. “Whad Cap'n mean when he says we're fixin ta go ta Injun country today?” Tater asked.

  Carl and Virgil exchanged a knowing glance. “Didn't you study history in school?” Virgil said.

  “I dropped outta school. Tweren't nuttin they had to say that I cared to hear.”

  “You ever heard of General Sheridan or Mackenzie?” Carl asked.

  Tater gave a blank stare.

  “What about Custer before he had that unfortunate incident at Little Bighorn?” Virgil added.

  Nothing registered.

  Carl said, “Well let's just say that before the west was won, there was this whole other group of people living there, and we had to get them to leave.”

  “Yeah, but what's that got to do with Vietnam?” Tater said.

  “Well, the Colonel decided that we need to expand our free-fire zone,” Vigil said. “The only problem with that is there's this village—we're calling it Oxbow—we gotta move that village so it's outside the free-fire zone. I mean you can't have a vill
age inside of a free-fire zone. The whole point of a free-fire zone is to be able to shoot anything that moves.”

  “So we're fixin’ to move ’em out?” Tater said.

  “We're encouraging them to find a better location for their village,” Carl said.

  “Kinda like we did with the Indians,” Virgil added.

  Carl took a last drag from his cigarette, dropped it into the 105 casing, and stood up. “We probably ought not keep the big dogs waiting.” The three men hoisted rucksacks onto their backs, slung their M16s over their shoulders, and headed toward the sound of the first helicopter rotors breaking the morning calm.

  The Hueys made quick work of getting the soldiers to the landing zone, sweeping in fast and low, skidding to a stop at the edge of a field where water buffalo mixed shoulder to shoulder with yellow cows. About a hundred yards upstream stood a small hooch with a lean-to for a manger. Another hundred yards beyond that was the collection of huts that made up the hamlet code-named Oxbow.

  “You two on me.” Gibbs pointed at Carl and Virgil. “The rest of first squad take to the road. Clear out everything on the way. Assemble the gooks in the center of Oxbow and wait for Lieutenant Maas.”

  Gibbs led Carl and Virgil toward the hooch in the field, the one with the manger, while the rest of the squad headed down the dirt road that led to Oxbow. As they reached the halfway point between the LZ and the hooch, a patch of elephant grass at the edge of the field shook with life. Carl readied the stock of his weapon against his shoulder and drew down on the moving grass.

  “Fire, Iverson!” Gibbs called out.

  Carl squeezed his finger against the trigger but then eased up. A bulb of black hair bounced through the tall grass running toward the hooch.

  “He's evading!” Gibbs yelled. “God dammit fire!”

  Carl squeezed the trigger again, but again released it as a teenage girl charged out of the elephant grass and scrambled for her home.

  “It's just a girl, Sarge,” Carl said, lowering his weapon.

  “I gave you an order.”

  “She's civilian.”

  “She's evading, so that means she's VC.”

  “Sarge, she's running home.”

  Gibbs charged at Carl. “Iverson, I gave you a goddamn order. You ever disobey my command again, I'll put a bullet through your head. You hear me?” Tobacco juice dripped from the corners of his mouth as he spat his fury at Carl. The girl, of no more than fifteen years, made it to her hooch, and Carl could hear her talking to someone inside in that strange broken Vietnamese tongue he had heard so many times, like a familiar song with indiscernible lyrics. Gibbs turned his attention to the hooch and considered it for a moment.

  “You two go shoot those cows,” Gibbs yelled. “Then burn the barn. I'll handle the hooch.”

  Virgil and Carl looked at each other. There were some pages of the field manual that were worthless in the field, except maybe to wipe your ass with. But there were some instructions that demanded respect. One of those rules to respect was to never clear a hut alone.

  “Sarge?” Virgil asked.

  “Now, dammit!” Gibbs barked at Virgil. “I ain't gonna have trouble with you, too, am I? I gave you an order. Now go shoot those cows.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Carl and Virgil walked to the field, raised their rifles, and started firing into the heads of the unsuspecting beasts. In less than a minute the cows were dead, and Carl turned his attention toward the hooch. In the distance he could see the rest of the squad rousting villagers from their huts, marching them down the dirt road, herding them toward the center of the village. Gibbs was nowhere to be seen.

  “Somethin’ ain't right,” Carl said.

  “Where's Sarge?” Virgil answered.

  “That's what I mean. It shouldn't take this long.”

  The two men moved toward the hooch, their M16s at the ready. Virgil took up a position to cover Carl as Carl crept up to the door, being careful to step on soft grass to avoid the crunch of sand on the hard-packed dirt. He steadied his breathing, listening to muffled grunting coming from the other side of the thatched wall. Carl nodded to himself as he counted down from three and charged through the door.

  “Jesus Christ!” Carl slid as he stopped his charge, pulling the muzzle of his rifle up, and almost stumbling backward through the opened door. “Sarge! What the hell?”

  Gibbs had the girl pinned down, her knees on the plank floor, her torso pressed down on a rickety bamboo bed, most of her clothing ripped away. Gibbs knelt behind her, his fatigues bunched down around his thighs, his hairy, pale butt cheeks flexing with each thrust.

  “I'm interrogating a VC sympathizer,” he said over his shoulder.

  Gibbs had her arms wrenched behind her back, holding her wrists with one hand, leaning on her, holding her against the bed with his weight. She struggled to breathe as his girth flattened her lungs. In the corner of the hut, an old man lay lifeless on his side, a rut the size of a rifle butt cutting across his nose and left cheek bone, blood trickling from his empty eye socket.

  With an angry flourish, Gibbs finished his irruption and pulled his pants back up. The girl did not move.

  “Your turn,” he said to Carl.

  Carl couldn't speak. He couldn't move.

  Gibbs took a step toward Carl. “Iverson, I'm tellin’ you to interrogate this VC sympathizer. That's an order.”

  Carl fought to keep from retching. The girl lifted her head enough to turn and look at Carl, her lips trembling with fear, or rage, or both.

  “Did you hear me?” Gibbs shouted, pulling his service revolver from its holster and ratcheting a round into the chamber. “I said that's an order.”

  Carl stared at the girl's face, at the hopelessness in her eyes. He heard Gibbs chamber the round in his 45, but Carl paid it no heed. He would defy the banshee. He would leave Vietnam with his soul, or die with it intact.

  “No, sir,” Carl said.

  Gibbs's eyes went red. He stabbed the muzzle of the gun into the side of Carl's head. “You disobeyed a direct order. You're a dead man.”

  “Sarge, what are you doing?” Virgil yelled from the doorway.

  Gibbs looked at Virgil, then back at Carl.

  “Sarge, this ain't the way to handle it,” Virgil said. “Think it through.”

  Gibbs held the gun against Carl's temple, huffing through his flared nostrils like a horse ridden hard. He stepped back from Carl, the gun still aimed at Carl's head. “You're right,” he said. “There is a better way to handle this.” He holstered his side arm and pulled a knife from the scabbard strapped to his thigh. He turned to the girl, who still lay naked, half on the bed, half on the floor. Grabbing a fistful of her hair, he yanked her to her knees.

  “Next time I give you an order to shoot a gook…” He pulled the knife across her throat, cutting deep into the gristle and tissue, the blood spurting onto Carl's boots. “You'd better goddamn obey me.” The girl jerked and twitched as blood filled her lungs. Her eyes rolled up into her forehead, and Gibbs let her limp body fall to the floor. “Now burn this hooch.” Gibbs stepped over the body and put his face into Carl's face. “That's an order.”

  Gibbs left the hut, but Carl couldn't move.

  “C'mon, Hoss.” Virgil pulled Carl backward out of the hooch. “This ain't our Alamo. We gotta keep our shit intact. Remember?”

  Carl rubbed his eyes on the sleeves of his shirt. Virgil headed to the manger with his cigarette lighter in his hand.

  To the north, the entire village had been set aflame; a line of villagers, now refugees, marched like condemned prisoners down the dirt road that would lead them out of the free-fire zone. Carl pulled his zippo from his pocket and touched it to the dried palm fronds and elephant grass of the hut. Within a couple seconds, flame engulfed the thatch roof, the smoke rolling off as thick as water.

  Carl stepped back from the hut as the ravenous fire licked down from the roof, covering the two bodies on the floor. That's when he saw something that filled
his chest with ice. The girl's hand opened; her fingers reached out, beckoning to Carl. They trembled as the girl strained to reach out. Then they curled back into her palm as the fiery roof crashed down on top of her.

  I watched Lila as she read my assignment, her face wincing as she read about Gibbs raping the girl, her eyes looking up at me in disbelief after reading about the girl's hand moving as the burning hut fell in on her.

  “You can see why Virgil was so adamant that Carl is innocent,” I said.

  “Is this true?” she held up my assignment.

  “Every word,” I said. “Virgil confirmed it. He was there. Said Carl was never the same after that day.”

  “Wow,” Lila whispered. “Did you notice that the girl in Vietnam was burned in her hut just like Crystal was burned in that shed?”

  “That's what you got out of that?” I said.

  “It seems more than coincidental, don't you think?”

  “His sergeant put a gun to his head. He was willing to die rather than rape that girl. That's what the story is about. How could that man in Vietnam be the same man who killed Crystal Hagen? If he's really a rapist and a murderer, he would have given in to the dark side when he was in Vietnam.”

  “You think he's innocent?” Lila asked, her tone more inquisitive than condemning.

  “I don't know,” I said. “I'm starting to. I mean, it's possible, isn't it?”

  Lila considered my question for a long time before answering, rereading the last part of my assignment, the part where Carl refused Gibbs's order. Then she put the paper down. “Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that Carl is not the killer. What does that mean?”

  I thought about her question for a moment. “It means that someone else did it.”

  “Of course it means that,” she said. “But who?”

  “It could be anyone,” I said. “It could be some random guy walking by that saw her home alone.”

  “I don't think so,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “The diary,” she said. “I suppose it's possible that some random guy killed her. But if the diary holds any meaning, Crystal was being threatened. Some guy was forcing her to do stuff. That means that Crystal knew her attacker.”