by Alfredo Vea
In one place, a ragged patch of hair follicles and skin soiled the stigma and stamens of a weeping blue blossom, repelling bee after bee. In another, scores of red seeds had erupted from human bodies, bursting violently through the drabness of cloth and skin—seed of stomach, seed of lung, hopeless grains set onto the wind. Everywhere, shell casings littered the garden like brazen chaff.
Among the wide spray of innards was a slice of cerebellum, a single sliver of mind, thrown yards from its previous owner. On a stem of wild lemon grass hung a taste for grape soda and shepherd’s pie, the memory of her goodbye, even the newborn baby’s impulse to cry when the world was upside down. On a leaf of wild lemon grass specks of sense were stranded and fading—three digits of a phone number, a single syllable from the second verse of a cherished song, and half a glimpse of a woman’s entire face.
At the top of the hill, drying in the sunlight, was an array of green pods: plastic bags snapped shut and steaming from within. A chaplain crawled among them, calling out to God and screaming the names of the newly dead at the top of his lungs. His body shook with palsy as he went from bag to bag retrieving a dog tag and their personal effects and marking soiled paperwork with their names and the date of their death.
A sergeant by his side was helping him with the grisly duty. Below them, grunts were laying out more concertina wire, setting new trip flares, and replanting the hill with claymore mines. Behind the landing pad, the bunkers that protected the radio emplacement were being rebuilt by a gaggle of shirtless, wordless men.
“Try to calm down, padre,” said the black sergeant. “Tonight’s gonna be our last night in this place. I’m sure of that.” He had a smooth and soothing Southern accent. His voice was a round baritone with a burnish of gentleness that belied his muscular build and serious eyes. A hint of both French and of Dixieland seasoned every sentence he spoke.
“I just talked to battalion. I gave them a sit-rep from hell and they won’t dare leave us hanging like last night. You have my word on that. Now, take some deep breaths, padre. Otherwise you’re gonna bust your heart wide open. I’ve seen it happen. Like the boys always say, keep your shit wired tight.”
The sergeant’s words were slurred. He had almost bitten his tongue in two during the last mortar barrage. It was a terrible habit that, perversely, the sergeant had grown to love. The feel of bloat ing and the taste of blood in his mouth meant that he had survived once again.
“After tonight we can blow all this equipment and di-di back to Dong Ha. I can get me a cold beer and a Playboymagazine and you can go on down to Da Nang and rip off some of that sacramental wine and talk philosophy with that captain friend of yours. Da Nang will calm you down. It’s surrounded by beaucoup marines, Special Forces, and the Ameri-Cal. As for me, I don’t mind Dong Ha. Sure, it’s a damn toilet, but there ain’t nothing to worry about in Dong Ha except them eight-foot rockets and them nightly probes by Victor Charlie.”
The black sergeant was smiling and softening his language for the chaplain’s sake. There was nothing to smile about. The only words appropriate to this place were obscenities. He deeply regretted talking his friend Jesse into joining him on this mission. The air support last night had been gravely inadequate: two Huey gunships and a single pass by a pair of fast movers. The jets had shot their wads, then had streaked home for a pizza and some Korean beer. Because of the distance from here to their home base, they had no loiter time over the target. Someone in Da Nang thought this hill had a low priority.
“I can’t stay another night,” moaned the chaplain. “I just can’t stay another night on this hill. I can’t hold it together. I hate the holes on this hill. We’re digging our own graves. I hate living in this grass. I hate living in holes, and I hate hills and I hate all the insects in this godforsaken country.”
The look of profound anguish that had settled into his eyes during the night hovered on his entire face like a permanent shadow. Inhaling deeply, then holding his breath, he snapped open the last body bag and began to sob uncontrollably once again. It was the Russian boy from New Jersey, the one that had “John Wayne” written in large script on his helmet and tattooed on his right arm.
“Someone ought to shoot John Wayne,” whispered the chaplain, his voice breaking and a small trickle of blood moving downward from his left nostril to the notch of his upper lip, where it mixed with the smelling salts he had smeared on earlier.
“Yeah,” sighed the sergeant, “for someone who never picked up a real gun, he’s sure gotten a lot of American boys killed.”
They both stared downward at the muddy white face of the handsome Russian boy. His face had once been beautiful. Now there were swatches of torn skin spread from shoulder to shoulder like leaves on a pillow. There was insect predation already visible. He was a naturalized citizen with an unpronounceable name. His buddies had simply called him Roosky. Neither dared open the snaps any farther. There was little left below the chest. His tattoos and his birthmarks had been liquefied by a mortar round, a direct hit. The contents of the bottom half of the bag would never be shown in any war movie. No actor would ever suffer these wounds.
Last night had been a heartless flurry of extremes; straight lines of inexorable energy had moved oblivious to topologies, ignoring the palm of a hand or the curve of a tree. Vectors had burst randomly as planned. War had happened last night: the sensate had been placed in the same space as the senseless.
The chaplain checked the boy’s dog tag for a religious preference. His fingers shook as he lifted the small neck chain, then pulled at it to view the tag. The words No Preference were engraved into the burned metal. Using his thumb, the chaplain made a cross on the boy’s forehead. Behind the boy’s body bag his helmet was perched atop his M- 16, its muzzle pushed down into the dirt. An hour ago his platoon had stood down to honor him and the others.
Hours ago the padre had become heart-sickened at the ticklish rubbing of his own selfish and cowardly lips against the earlobes of the dying. Despite all his best efforts, he had puked at the sight of open chest and stomach wounds, at the fragile plumbing, the crimson jellies and brackish rivulets just beneath the skin. He had never been able to stare at God’s secret baggage without revulsion, and that revulsion had degraded his prayers until they were little more than feckless mumblings. His sickened face had, itself, become a profound betrayal, a ruthless mirror that showed pleading, desperate boys that there was no prayer in heaven or on earth that could keep them or their image alive.
“I have to close his eyes,” whimpered the padre. “I’ve got to close his eyes.”
“Why?” asked the sergeant. “He slid out of his mother’s sack face up with his eyes open. Now he’s slid back into a sack. Let the poor bastard see where he’s going.”
It had occurred to the young chaplain this morning that a man’s intestines and kidneys looked remarkably like wet plastic bags filled with ocher and purplish fluids. Fibrous plastic bags filled with putrid juices seemed so carelessly jammed into the tightest spots beneath the ribs. He chuckled painfully at the thought of people dressed up and out on dates carrying those bags inside of them; they spoke of classic beauty and sighed at the depth of love while those hideous bags gushed and gurgled inside of them.
“All we love is skin!” he screamed.
The sergeant beside him said nothing. Trench madness was something he had seen before. He had experienced it himself. Some folks still called it the thousand-yard stare or combat fatigue, stupid euphemisms for the effects of unrelenting terror. The sergeant hated euphemisms. In a place where battles were seldom won by anyone, the number crunchers and accountants in Saigon had gone crazy with them. Casualties had evolved into “acceptable losses” and from there to “limited breakage” or projected “spillage.” There was even a set of words for civilian deaths caused by military operations: “overspray” and “overkill.”
“Love songs were written for intact skin!” muttered the chaplain, who sobbed uncontrollably as he spoke. “I am a fucking f
raud.”
At another time he would have winced at the vulgarity of his own words. He had recited the Extreme Unction into the ears of scores of eighteen-year-olds and he had never once had the strength to “sell the prayer,” as they called it at chaplain’s school. How on earth can you be a thespian when a severed artery is spurting all over your script, when desperation is always stepping on your lines? Out of craven fear he had rushed his prayers. Like a drunken, harried actor he had mumbled his way through his forgotten lines. He had ushered his boys—his flock—off to eternity with a shoddy, extemporaneous supplication ringing in their ears.
The padre raised his eyes to the horizon. In a single night he had acquired the combat veteran’s hardened eyes and numbed face. Out there somewhere, the sermons were already being said for the Russian boy. The swing shift at graves registration in Da Nang would already be generating an inventory of his parts and categorizing his remains as unviewable. Apprentice morticians would scurry for a shot at his corpse. A forklift at a warehouse near China Beach would he taking his aluminum casket down from the high, shining stacks. It had been made for him. The metal had been smelted, stressed, and formed especially for him. Before the Russian boy was born, the aluminum ore had been dug from the ground just for him.
Forms would be filled out in duplicate directing that other forms be filled out in triplicate. In some Quonset hut in Da Nang the boilerplate notice of death and letter of condolence were being cut by a clerk-typist, a private first class with just one month in country. Somewhere else a bored captain whose short-timer calendar was almost completely filled would sign a tall stack of such letters using a rubber stamp of his signature.
In just a few days Roosky’s mother would find the dreaded letter in her mailbox. She would wait long, terrible hours before opening it. Her unheard wails would assail the walls of her little home with unremitting grief. In one instant her soul would flood with every bedspread that she had straightened for him, every bowl of borscht and every meat pie that she had ever cooked for him, every laughing sigh at his seeming inability to change his dirty underwear. Someday, somewhere, his two brothers were lying awake at night straining to recall the features of his face. Someday, somewhere, fingers were already reaching out to touch cold, dark marble, to follow the deep, chiseled letters of his engraved name. Somewhere a flag was being folded, corner to corner to corner. Now it is being placed into the hands of a woman.
“I am the resurrection and the life….” The chaplain groaned, using his forearms to cover his own contorted face. Hours ago he had tried his best to speak into this boy’s ear, but the sight of a perfectly formed concha and an unstained lobe amidst all of the ruin had overcome him once again. The sweaty, bloody boy had expired without forgiveness.
“Combat makes the skin permeable, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it, sergeant? Everyone here is covered with blood and sweat and piss. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? We’re protecting our innermost fluids while trying to cause leaks in the skin of the enemy. There’s even a technical word for it, isn’t there? An ugly acronym: SLUD. Salivation, lacrimation, urination, and defecation.”
“Padre,” said the black sergeant patiently, “can I tell you something? Ecoutez-moiun moment.” The padre nodded without uncovering his sickened face.
“After this, after what you’ve seen here, your old life is nothing but a lie.”
After a moment of silence the chaplain responded weakly, “What do you mean?” The statement had struck its mark at the very center of the chaplain’s soul. His own life was truly nothing but a lie.
“When you was back in the world, there was happiness and sadness, of course—car accidents, promotions, demotions, tragic illnesses, and birthdays. Sometimes you was sick, but mostly you was feeling tres bien, feeling pretty good.”
The chaplain nodded weakly. His eyes were still dilated and his skin was clammy and gray with shock. His former life now seemed like a dream.
“Now and again a close relative passes on; someone who seemed happy turns around and blows their brains out and some completely unworthy fool goes and wins the lottery. Remember the world, padre? Now, padre, let’s say that your old life was a car with a nice, big speedometer on the dashboard. When you was happy, you would be cruising along at sixty. Top speed was around seventy miles an hour. When you was sad, your life would be pokin’ along at ten miles an hour or sometimes even slower.”
The chaplain dropped his arms and opened his eyes, squinting at the unbelievable ugliness around him. In the clearing at the base of the hill, a suffering North Vietnamese soldier lifted his arm straight into the air. From somewhere to the right a shot rang out and the North Vietnamese soldier slumped and died, his final request granted.
“Please forgive me, but I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to say.”
“Padre,” continued the sergeant calmly, “since you been to the Nam, since you been on this red dirt hill, that old speedometer of yours has just got to be tossed out. It’s outdated. It’s junk. Now you understand that there’s happiness far beyond sixty miles an hour, and there’s sadness and grief way, way down below zero. Do you remember how happy you were this morning when the dinks who breached the western perimeter were stopped and the incoming ceased and you found yourself in one piece?”
The padre nodded. There was extreme joy and a hint of shame in his nod. His relief at having survived was an ecstasy beyond expression and beyond measure. His relief had been beyond holy.
“Think about how sad you are right now about that hoy’s death, about all of their deaths. You’re feelin’ it now, padre That old life of yours back in the world was a lie. You had a small speedometer, padre. A tiny, pathetic little gauge up there on the dashboard of your existence. Until something goes terribly wrong, everyone back home is idling in first gear. All of them are asleep. Before you came here, padre, you was idling, too.”
There was simmering anger in the sergeant’s voice. “ ‘War’ was just a word in some politician’s mouth. ’Combat’ was a word that bartenders and sportscasters used to describe a football game. ‘Sudden death’ was something that jocks looked forward to in a game that’s gone into overtime. ’Next of kin’ was just a phrase, just a bunch of faceless people back in the world. It was all a judas-goat lie, like John Wayne wading through Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, and them recruitment posters.”
The two men moved to the last body bag. Beneath the flap and closures was the decimated face of a brand new first lieutenant. He had been platoon leader for exactly two days. The chaplain shook his head violently, so the sergeant opened the bag and removed the dog tags. He tore one tag from its small chain, then placed the other one into the mouth of the dead soldier. The first tag was handed to the chaplain. The sergeant lifted the first lieutenant’s jaw to close it, then snapped the bag shut. The tag was designed to be wedged into the matching gaps in the upper and lower front teeth, then the jaw would he jammed shut by shoving the chin. But the sergeant had never been able to do it.
“Remember all those folks that come on the television after surviving an airplane crash? They all say that their life has been changed forever, that they’re really gonna appreciate their life after coming so close to losing it. The grunts over here, the boys with their asses in the grass, they go through a plane crash every fucking day, sometimes every hour. No matter how much preparation you do or how much equipment you got, when there’s contact with Charlie everything falls to shit, it’s one terrible accident after another.
“I don’t give a good goddamn about all them fancy plans and code names them brass-plated idiots over in Da Nang dream up—it all falls apart out here. Jelesemmerde! But out here, no airline sends a team of psychologists to help them.” He pointed to a group of troops below. “Nobody will ever give a shit. No one will ever come along to readjust their speedometers. If they get out of here alive, they will always be running at a different speed. A normal day back in the world won’t even register on their instruments. The world won’t mov
e them no more. Whether you live or die, once you been here you become invisible to normal people. The ones that live ain’t never the same.” The sergeant paused. “There ain’t no justice out here, man, there’s just us.”
The sergeant placed an arm on the chaplain’s shoulder.
“Look here at these young ones, padre.” The sergeant gestured down the hill toward another group of men. “Shit, they ain’t figured out how to undo a brassiere or how to ask a woman for a date yet, and some of them will never get that chance. And here they’re supposed to solve the great mystery! Don’t none of them even know what the question is, and here they’ve got a face-to-face look at the final answer. ‘t’hey’re the toughest motherfuckers on earth, but they’re just boys, bedwetters and jackoffs. You’d think a fair God would let ‘em have one fuck before they get blown apart, just one little old mercy fuck.”
A new flood of perspiration had broken out on the sergeant’s face. It was not the salty sheen of hard labor or the oily slick generated by fear. It was the pure, plaintive sweat of helplessness, the sweat of a childhood fever.
“These boys are fighting a two-front war, padre. That was the mistake the Germans made in World War Two. They’re fighting the Vietnamese and they’re fighting America, too. For most of these black kids the army is the first time they have ever been allowed to sit and eat with whites—at least they can in this platoon. Back in the world, you never see what you’re looking at right now: Mexican kids talking with blacks. It’s rare, even here. Shit, I’ve seen platoons that are as segregated as Selma. Some of these boys from the reservations ain’t never seen a white man except on television, and here they’re fighting for him. Shit, this fucking police action ain’t nothing but a turf war. Today it’s ours, tomorrow it’ll be theirs.”
The sergeant dropped his head and was silent for a moment. Beads of sweat fell from his forehead and nose.
“Did you notice, lieutenant, that beside some of those Montagnards over there, you and me and the skipper over in HQ are the only grown-up men here? Shit, some of them zips that breached the wire last night don’t even have pubic hair yet. C”est un baller bleu infame! That’s what this is, unballet bleu infame.“
