by Alfredo Vea
“Close that goddamn door, lieutenant!” roared the colonel, “it’ll take an hour to get this room back down to seventy degrees. Do you remember what happened to the prophets of Baal, lieutenant?”
The chaplain stepped through the door without answering his superior officer. The prophets had been taken from the top of the hill into a nearby valley where they had been slaughtered, one by one. It had not really been a contest. It had been a trap.
“And may God be with you,” the colonel had called out as the door slammed shut.
When the young chaplain last saw the colonel he had been sitting behind his desk polishing the brass crucifix on his clean, dustless helmet and sneaking a quick peek at a pair of brigadier general’s stars that he kept hidden in his desk, just in case the rumors from Command were true.
The chopper was blessedly clean. The ground crew had washed and sterilized it. It was a “slick,” a lightly armed troop carrier and the very same helicopter that had brought the chaplain to Da Nang just hours earlier. The lieutenant peeked cautiously into the doorway, then sighed. The ground crew had used a high pressure water hose to remove the blood and body parts. A wave of nausea washed over the chaplain’s face as he remembered last night’s flight, and the young soldier who had flown back with him. The grunt had been cradling his own helmet in his shaking arms as the chopper lifted from the hill. In the webbing of the helmet was the young man’s own right kneecap.
“They can sew it back on, can’t they?”
The young soldier had repeated that question over and over. They couldn’t. The leg it had come from was out there, somewhere below the dark canopy of tree limbs. But beyond the sadness that the chaplain had felt for the young man, there was something else, something deviated and twisted. He had experienced the strange, almost overpowering desire to touch the kneecap. It had been so perverse. It was certainly something he would never have wanted to do while it was still attached to a living leg.
Once the compulsion to touch the kneecap had seized him, the chaplain had heard nothing during the flight, not the beating of the rotors, not the door gunner slashing the muzzle of his machine gun from side to side. He had not heard the soldiers’ questions nor their pleas to administer the last rites to the legless boy.
The delirium that had begun on the hill had intensified beyond measure when finally the young lieutenant reached out with his right hand toward a cradled helmet, and with a shaking index finger touched disembodied cartilage, graying skin and a cold, ragged piece of vastus medialis.
When the chopper began its descent to the hill, the padre moved to the door to look downward. From the descending chopper his view had been obscured at first by dust and smoke. What was it that he saw below? Was it high Masada or ravaged Antioch? Was it the charred summit of Mount Carmel? As the Huey neared the LZ, the chaplain bit his lip. There were more green bags stacked at the top of the hill.
The hill below had been completely blackened all the way to its crest. There were unfamiliar blisters and newly cut gashes in the crust of the earth. Smoke was seeping from deep fissures. The jungle around the base of the hill had been completely razed. More terrible things had happened during the night.
The padre fought back the competing desires to scream or burst into tears. If what he saw below had happened in Central Park, it would be considered an American tragedy. The newspapers would be filled with this story for weeks. If a New York-to-Saigon passenger jet had gone down in the Sheep Meadow, every ambulance from five boroughs would be down below, parked helter-skelter, their doors ajar, their blinding, blinking lights flashing madly, urgently.
The phone lines would be jammed with calls from terrified families and still hopeful loved ones. The coroner’s office would spend weeks checking reams of dental records. Anguished family members would have to be carried away after identifying the body. Camera shots would be averted in deference. There would be candles and prayers in scores of churches and Buddhist temples. Human beings had been transformed into sacks of skin dripping crimson. Blame would have to be assigned, lawyers retained, culpability alleged in a hundred lawsuits.
But here, on the Laotian border, the survivors’ sorrow would be deferred for decades. The families of these victims would never be able to imagine the deaths of their loved ones. Responsibility would be dissolved in the acid solution of patriotism. Agony would be soothed by the sweet balm of loyalty. What the padre saw below was not the Sheep Meadow. It was nothing at all. Just the end of a minor siege in an anonymous place.
The metal containers that held the radio equipment looked strange. He was not able to focus his eyes on them. They seemed distorted, misshapen, as if drawn in sfumato. Their color had gone from drab green to a dark, streaked gray. As he stepped from the chopper, the chaplain noticed that some of the troops were standing silently by the larger container box, the Salon des Refuses.
They stood in a half circle at the crest of the hill, their hats off and their necks craned at the same identical angle. Their rifles were somewhere else entirely, dropped or discarded, but almost certainly forgotten for the moment. There were mortar tubes, canteens, helmets, and bandoliers left here and there in give-a-shit randomness. Every square inch of scorched ground around them was littered with Claymore sacks and ammo boxes.
The chaplain took his place among the boys, who were unaware of him and of one another as they stood and stared. They were slumping in a semicircle; rubber-legged, breathing heavily and barely conscious. They stood in that way that troopers stand when, for some unknown and unknowable reason, death has brushed against them, then shoved against them, then left them untouched as it moved on to fully embrace someone else. Their bodies, still vibrating with terror, sagged within their soaked clothing as they stared in common disbelief.
Young men who could believe in little more than pneumatics, ballistics, and small superstitions were struck dumb by what they saw. What they saw was a phenomenon, like a planet with a slightly erratic orbit, thereby proving the presence of yet another body. What they were seeing was something even more intriguing than Sputnik. They were witnessing a true miracle in a land otherwise administered by the laws of physics and governed by the rules of probability, and they called others over to see it.
“Come here, man, and look at this!”
“Amigos, ven acá. Míralo. Lamierda! Miralo!”
“Shit, you gotta see this!”
Another man joined them as they all peered at a small, shining object. Unlike the others, he had dragged his rifle with him, and its flash suppressor dug a line in the mud beside him as he walked. He moved to the half circle and took his place in a gap between two soldiers. He stood next to the padre. It was Jesse, still living. Jesse bent down to look at the object more carefully, then fell to one knee.
It was indeed a miracle. He was seeing a miracle. The chaplain noticed a sort of Kirlian aura around Jesse’s head. Was it evidence of a phantom life that had been traumatically torn away or was it simply the heat that was generated when a young life changes too fast?
On the outside skin of the metal wall of the container box, a dog tag hung from its small, fragile chain. The dog tag was shining and perfect, and the chain, as far as was visible, was perfectly intact. There was a small slot in the outer wall of the box, a slot that was precisely the same size as the edge of the metal tag. The tag had been blown through two layers of corrugated, reinforced steel, and neither the chain nor the tag had been broken or marked in any manner.
There it was, the wafer-thin tag materializing through metal, walking through walls and putting the terrible force of plastique to shame. There it was, hanging like a weed daring to grow in a fissure of steel, like a tender vine pushing itself through a crack in the mortar of a stone fence. It was an absurd act of life, this name and serial number pressed through to the world of the living from the hell that existed on the other side.
The frail chain was unbroken. Had it passed through the substance of a human neck? Or did the terrible explosion carefully lif
t it off the neck and guide it over the head, being careful not to let it catch on the ears? Without saying a word, the man on his knee stood. then reached up and pulled the door open even farther. The canvas bag that had carried the explosive was little more than a layer of tan dust. The sapper’s brown feet were still there, just inside the door. Between his sandaled feet was the single green and black boot of an American soldier. None of the feet were connected to legs. Nothing else of the two men could be seen.
“Supposing there is a God,” said someone. “Supposing He really gives a shit?”
Had their bodies liquefied and commingled with the sandbags, the PSP, and all the electronic equipment? Had someone already removed the American’s body and flown it back to Da Nang? Did more than one NVA get this far when they overran the hill last night? Could they have retrieved their comrade’s body? Everything within the container was seared black and melting together. The in terior walls and the roof of the reefer bulged outward, a ghastly black circle of striated and smoking steel. The Salon des Refusés’s sign had been blown a hundred yards down the hill.
Jesse then moved back to the tiny altar hanging on the side of the box. Now even more soldiers had gathered to see it. An Indian soldier stared silently. He was smoking a joint in broad daylight. The brass wouldn’t have approved, but the brass was dead. Tiburcio Mendez crossed himself and dropped down to one knee to stare.
“Qué milagro, ”whispered Mendez solemnly. His true voice was veiled with sadness. The mere sight of the dog tag had brought him some small measure of relief. His best friend Julio Lopez was up there in one of the body bags. Mendez had been at his side when blood orchids had blossomed on his upper chest and neck. Mendez laughed a crying laugh. He had actually seen flowers instead of exit wounds. Maybe it had been a sign. Perhaps this milagro meant that Lopez’s wounds, in the hallowed presence of El Señor, would soon be transformed into bright, spreading bouquets.
There was a small relief in their eyes. Perhaps the war wasn’t just physics, after all. Perhaps they weren’t just anonymous bodies being smashed together in a linear accelerator where predictable pieces flew off and energy was released in the form of human souls. Ineffable, unreasonable things still happened. There was still a place on this earth for mystery. Jesse reached for the dog tag, and before anyone could stop him he pulled it from its chain and dropped it into his pocket.
The men around him groaned, then returned slowly to their tasks. The spell had been broken. There were three or four bodies still to be tagged and bagged, radio equipment and crypto logs to be destroyed. The tall body of the boy from Mississippi had to be carried up the hill to the LZ. The medevac choppers would fly him to Da Nang, where his large intestines would be sterilized then reinserted into the cavity below his stomach. Then his wounds would be sewn shut, but it would be too late. No one would know that he had been shot and killed in the same instant that his hero, Martin Luther King, had turned to ask a question at the windy back door of room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel.
“Do I really need a coat?”
It would be four full days before his brothers in the field would find out about the assassination in Memphis. They would be told by Hanoi Radio.
“African-American soldiers, why are you fighting for a country that kills your greatest leader? Why are you fighting for a country that will not let you eat at a lunch counter with whites?”
“Is Dr. King really dead?” a thousand GI voices would say. “Man, is the King of love really dead? It was a white man that killed him, wasn’t it? Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus fucking Christ! Why the fuck am I shooting at zips? They ain’t never did me no wrong, never called me nigger. I should be back home shooting at the man, shooting at the Klan!”
Following orders from the Pentagon, Armed Forces Radio would delay the story for fear that black soldiers would riot, for fear that they would lay down their arms and refuse to kill men of color. In a few hours the hill would be given back to the NVA and to the jungle. Somewhere down the slope the chaplain had left the altar to poke and prod at the rubble in an effort to locate his personal Bible. Jesse watched as the chaplain suddenly stood bolt upright, dropping the charred Bible to the ground.
The padre had inadvertently focused his eyes on the burned objects around his feet. He had walked into the middle of the objects assuming they were tree stumps or blackened sandbags. He had inhaled the smoke. But they weren’t tree stumps at all. They were bodies, charcoal and purple bodies eternally locked in the familiar pugilist’s contraction; the blanched, yellow bones beneath the simmering embers cracked open by the enormous force of muscles contracting violently in the heat—the usual reaction to napalm.
Now the padre had surely seen enough. Now he had touched far more than a kneecap. Jesse watched him as the chaplain began to stagger like a drunkard toward the southern base of the hill. Somehow Jesse knew that he would not be coming back.
“Where are you going, padre?” called Jesse frantically as he ran down the hill toward the chaplain. “You know the sergeant is dead, don’t you?” said Jesse, his voice cracking. “I found a right foot in the container box. Jesus, I think it’s his. It’s so damn heavy. Do you know how heavy a foot is? They listed him as missing, but I know he’s dead. Do you know if medevac got him? Do you think he could be one of these bodies out here? Are any of these bodies missing a foot?”
Jesse’s crazed words were spilling out of his mouth.
“You know that Lopez and Cornelius are dead, don’t you? They were good boys, good friends. Who is going to sing ‘Taps’ now? I don’t know the goddamn words!”
Though tears were streaming down Jesse’s face, he would never believe that the mere presence of liquid meant that he must be crying. Crying was a release and a relief. These were silent tears of mourning that came not from his eyes but from deep in his muscles and bones. He would weep, but Jesse would never cry.
“Dirty sons of bitches!” he screamed at the burned bodies around him. He kicked the body nearest him, sending a faceless head rolling down the hill. Only the severed stem of the neck was pink. Jesse saw it and groaned. His speedometer was reading three hundred miles an hour.
“Where the fuck were you last night, padre? ”Jesse screamed even louder. “Lopez said his last confessions to me and I’m no priest! Lopez wanted you, padre. He had to settle for me! He wanted to tell you that he stole money from his mother when he was ten, and that he used to spy on his younger sister when she was naked in the shower! Her name is Yolanda. One time he even masturbated while she douched. Some deep confessions, huh? He was a real bad one, huh? A real sinner! You let them down! Where were you, padre? Spam Boy is gone, too. He spoke Hawaiian. It’s a feminine language, isn’t it? It’s full of vowels. You let them all down!”
“I know, Jesse. I know,” said the lieutenant in a desolate voice. “But please tell me what happened here last night. What happened to you, Jesse?” said the padre, who was now staring into Jesse’s burning, flooded eyes. The Kirlian light around his face was even more intense than just minutes before. “It should have happened to me, too. You’re not the same. I can see you’re not the same. I don’t know why, but I can see it. I know I should’ve been here. I know I should’ve been here. Please tell me what happened here last night.”
“I can’t tell you, padre. I can’t tell you what happened.” Jesse used his filthy forearm to wipe the mud and tears from his face. He sank to his knees and began to shiver uncontrollably.
“I don’t ever want to think about it again. Never again! I will die before I ever think about this place again! Where the fuck do you think you are going?” Jesse demanded as he rose to his feet and grabbed the chaplain’s shoulder, forcing him to stop moving for a moment. His grip on the chaplain’s jacket was rough and painful, but there was no complaint.
“That way,” said the chaplain, pointing directly ahead.
He was pointing toward the southwest. Jesse released his grip and removed his hand from the padre’s shoulder. He looked into the man’s
eyes and saw that the padre was no longer a part of anyone’s army, not God‘s, not America’s. He was no longer a part of this war. The sweet, sooty smell of burning humans had finally released his tenuous mind from this agonized plane of reality.
No one on the hill would try to stop him as he walked away. It was his personal right. There were a whole lot of guys over here who had shot themselves in the foot to get out. It happened all the time. The young padre had just chosen to shoot himself in a far more vulnerable spot.
“Do you know that the sergeant told me something about this mission, Jesse?” said the padre as he walked away. His voice had darkened into a slur and his face had taken on a sinister look. The chaplain had decided to let one last communication flow from his closing mind. Jesse ran a few steps to catch up.
“He told me that this hill installation was a decoy. Isn’t that something? That other relay station thirty clicks to the east was the real thing. We were a decoy. We were never supposed to carry a signal. Those crypto machines were turned off. When the other installation went down, we had to take up the communications. The sergeant had to fire up this installation all by himself. He said that some deskbound full-bird colonel over at command came up with this bright idea. He said that the bastard’s probably calling his wife back home in Ohio right now, and is telling her about his promotion.”
“The North Vietnamese just hit both positions,” said Jesse with a tone of wonderment. It began to dawn on the young sergeant what exactly had happened. The chaplain nodded.
“They used most of their troops and heavy armor on the real radio repeater,” continued Jesse, “then they came back here for us. Somehow they knew which one was real. They knew it would take time for this one to get on line. By that time, the insertion teams in Cambodia would be fucked. This whole installation don’t mean nothing. They did this to us, padre, because they wanted us to know that they could do it.”
