The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  Then the wings came together again, enclosing his small body in a cocoon of feathers. When they opened, he saw that the field was clear and a cloud of cowbirds dipped and circled beneath them. His chest cleared, and he no longer felt like crying. He heard the high, clear notes of whistling and looked down. There was someone standing in the middle of the grassy field, waving and waving. The wings caught an upcurrent of air, and they glided toward the far end of the field. They cruised its wide square edge before coming back around.

  Bill cried out. It was James, wearing a dull green helmet that had “Elvis” painted in black letters on the side and balancing a rifle across his shoulders. He dropped the rifle and waved with both hands.

  “Hey, Billy! Hey, Billy Baboon!”

  “Jaaaamess! Jaaamess!” Bill shouted, but the wind took his voice and it disappeared in the rush of air between the feathers above him.

  “Over there!” his brother shouted, and picked up his rifle and pointed with it toward their own field. A single black speck was running over the brown plowed earth. The wings caught the cue and flapped harder. They closed the distance in a few seconds and swept lower.

  Bill screamed joyfully. “Shit house! You better run! You’re up shit creek now!”

  Merton was desperately running and tripping over the deep furrows in the field. Bill pulled his legs up to his chest and curled his toes. They dropped altitude and cruised right up behind Merton. Bill lowered his legs and hooked his feet under Merton’s arms. With legs suddenly as strong as steel cable, he lifted the squirming tonnage of a boy into the air twenty feet before dropping him.

  “Don’t hurt the little Hun! Jus’ scare ’im!” his brother shouted.

  Merton hit the soft plowed earth with a thump and a groan. But he got up and began running again, his head swiveling to pinpoint Bill’s location. Bill whooped. Merton, his eyes rolling wildly, ran harder. Again they came off a large current of air to level themselves behind the nemesis of Bill’s days. This time Bill did not pick him up but, with legs wound tight as springs against his chest, aimed and kicked, knocking Merton between the shoulder blades. Merton went down so hard he bit into the overturned field and ate dirt. He stayed down, breathing hard, grinding and spitting dirt. But he was not hurt, just scared. Bill stared at the sprawled-out boy as the wings lifted him back into the sky. Then, as quickly as the desire for revenge had come, it had gone, and they left the Lucas’ field with its cleaved and unplanted earth and returned to his brother, standing almost perfectly camouflaged with his green jungle uniform in the middle of their neighbor’s lush grassy field.

  James had taken off his helmet and stood smiling broadly up at Bill. The wings, despite their massive size, lowered Bill until the bottoms of his feet touched his brother’s shaved and bristly head. Bill could not speak. The wings didn’t lower him any farther, and they hovered while Bill’s feet curled around and hugged his brother’s head. A look of pain crossed his brother’s face. James reached up and encircled Bill’s ankles with his hands, kissing the bottom of his little brother’s feet.

  “Man! It’s really good to see you, Billy Baboon,” his brother said softly. “Really good.”

  James released one of Bill’s ankles and swept his arm in a semicircle around him. “I dream about this place all the time ... yeah, all the time.”

  He kissed Bill’s foot again. “Don’t ever leave here, Bill. You and me ... we’ll have some fun when I come home.”

  The wings flapped. Bill strained, stretching his legs as far as he could to touch his brother’s head. But the wings lifted him higher and higher. His brother put his helmet back on and picked up his rifle. He wiped his face on his sleeve and stared past Bill to the wings. James opened his mouth as if to say something but shut it again, raising his hand slightly.

  “I gotta go. But don’t worry. I love you, Billy! And Elvis,” James said, pointing to his helmet, “loves you too!”

  Bill watched James run from the field and disappear into the swamp on the edge. His heart beat against the wall of his chest. He heard the high notes of whistling echo from the swamp and smiled through his tears. “My baby does the hanky panky.” He tried to cry out. Nothing. He listened to the lingering sound of whistling, and then it struck him. If his brother had been down there, who was above him, carrying him?

  He stretched his neck to look up, but all he saw was sunlight, bright yellow and blinding. The wings flapped, covering his face, tickling and brushing his cheeks. A high guttural call pierced the air around him. The wings swept forward and covered him for the last time, enveloping him with the more familiar feel of his sheets and blankets, and with the descending silence of dreamless sleep.

  SO MUCH I DIDN’T KNOW when I left home.

  So much I did know.

  I never used to write letters. Mom would get on my back about writing thank-you notes to relatives for birthday and Christmas gifts. The relatives that never visited us and those we never visited. But in Nam it became the thing you hoped for. Wished for. There weren’t any phone booths. If you wanted a letter, you had to write one. I was careful when I wrote to my mother. I didn’t want her to worry. What I couldn’t write to her, I wrote to Bill. And I did something I never did before. I signed my letters “love.”

  I didn’t write to Rosemary and Ernie. I didn’t even say good-bye. It was a rotten thing to do. After all they’d done for me. I just knew when I signed up that they would talk me out of it. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t have any money, and I had to get the hell out of Olina somehow.

  I could never get them to talk much about their time in the service. Rosemary talked some. Ernie almost never. I knew he had medals but I never saw them. I tried to picture Ernie like those guys in the WW II movies Bill and I watched. John Wayne fighting his way out of Bataan. Guts and glory.

  There is a lot of guts but no fuckin’ glory. Flies on guts. Rain on guts. Bloody guts. Ropes and ropes of guts. Being wet all the time. My feet swollen inside my boots and bleeding. But if you looked out from the base and didn’t see it all close up, you’d think those hills were beautiful. Like the Garden of Eden. And it was at one time for the people who live here, who try to live here. Now it’s one fuckin’ dangerous place. It’s what Lieutenant Miller called surreal. I love that word. That feeling of being between what was real and what was unreal.

  Maybe, I said to Miller, it’s not so much SUR-real, but SO-REAL. He laughed. Nothing is as it seems.

  Once I reached up to pick a purple orchid hanging from a vine. Our Bru scout, Kho, jabbed me in the belly so that my arm automatically reflexed down.

  “No, no,” he whispered. “Look.”

  Christ. Tied to the orchid and almost invisible was a homemade grenade.

  What would I write to Ernie and Rosemary? How do you write, “Oh, yeah. I’m doing well. How are you?” after something like that? What if Kho hadn’t stopped me? How could I write, “I blew my hand off picking a goddamn flower”? They were different. I could have written that to them, and they would have known. That was what stopped me. I couldn’t write it, and I couldn’t lie. They would see through that. I couldn’t hurt them like that. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stayed silent. No letters. Even when I wrote to Mom and Bill, signing my letters with the word love just didn’t seem like enough. That was what I didn’t know. That you could love someone so much that nothing you said could say it.

  But what I did know prepared me even though I didn’t realize it until it happened.

  We were out on patrol for the last half of November. Me, Lieutenant Miller, Rick, Marv, Kho, and Cracker Jack, our radioman and Motown medic, whose real name was Solomon Jackson and who loved the Motown sound but did not come from Detroit. It came down the wire that the NVA was building up.

  “Fuckin’ shit, man. Just in time for Christmas,” Cracker Jack said, pissed because he hated reconnaissance patrol. Hated the week rotations we were out there.

  We were supposed to look for signs of them and to determine by the signs how ma
ny of them were out there. How many remains of camps did we find? Disturbed ground that might indicate a punji pit or piles of shit, human or elephant. Any dead? Any wounded? Any blood trails? We also had to radio in every time we got shot at. If we got shot at a lot, then the rumors were true.

  “What the hell,” I whispered to Rick so Marv wouldn’t hear, “we aren’t doing recon. We’re fuckin’ worms on a hook.”

  We had days of just hearing our footsteps. Then out of the blue we would hit the ground because of sudden rifle fire. It was my job as point man to keep my eyes up, to locate a possible muzzle flash, if any could be seen in the daylight. But even if I didn’t see the flash, I could pinpoint the direction just by hearing it. I almost never used my grenade launcher. My own arm was much better. I’d pull the pin and throw that first grenade. Blam! Then that pop! pop! pop! pop! of an AK-47 as if I’d asked a question and they’d answered back. That was what I wanted. I threw a few more grenades in the same direction. By that time Cracker Jack had radioed in our position, and we stayed put until we could hear a Cobra or a Sky-hawk overhead. We always prayed that the pilots got it right and fired or dropped a bomb where they were supposed to and not on us.

  It wasn’t the firefights that shook us up. It was the quiet in between. Marv drummed his fingers on his chest and bit his nails down. When his nails were gone, he chewed on the tips of his fingers. Rick ground his teeth. Cracker Jack just hung tight, and Lieutenant Miller rubbed his grenade launcher as though it were his dick. But eventually they’d all stop because you couldn’t stay jittery for long. After a while you became tired. That was what I remember the most. Exhaustion. It works on you. That terror of never knowing what’s going to happen next, of feeling surrounded, of being watched. If you weren’t careful, you’d get stupid with it. Miller’s eyes glazed over, and he walked as though his battery were running down. It got to me but not as bad. Cracker Jack handled it better too. I was trained for it, and from what little he told me, I suspect Cracker Jack was used to it too, from growing up in Chicago. My whole damn childhood had been like that. Never knowing what to expect next but to expect the unexpected.

  We’d come out of the trees from time to time and walk into stands of elephant grass. Grass that was way over our heads. Blades of grass that were just that: blades. Our arms looked as though they’d been nicked by razors, and sometimes our faces too. Those cuts would get infected, and whenever we took a rest, we would lift the scabs off and squeeze out the pus. Cracker Jack put ointment on them.

  Rick was from Austin, Minnesota. He said they had a prairie grass called cordgrass that grew in wet sloughs and that was almost as sharp. It scraped the skin instead of cut it. But it wasn’t as tall. No wonder they called it elephant grass. Only an elephant could walk through it and see above it without trouble, without feeling anything because elephant skin is so thick.

  We were two days away from going back to the base when Rick was shot.

  I could not get over Rick’s death. I was the point man. I was the one responsible for making sure the rest of the recon team did not get hurt. There was so much thick cover, and we were big waddling geese going through it. The jungle was not for Americans. We were too tall, too big. The Yards were small. The NVAs were too, and even before we found the holes they had dug or smelled the fish sauce they ate, I could sense them. They were everywhere, and with so much dense cover, it was dark and spooky. I’d never felt that way before. I’d grown up feeling so at home in the woods. I looked at the trees, and I had to look at the branches to make sure that one of those balled-up hunks of leaves and vines wasn’t a sniper. We were so tired that day that we could barely pick up our feet. It finally got to me. Living in fear day after day after day, even when nothing happened, stripped me down. I lost my appetite, which was just as well. We were eating fuckin’ C rations only once a day, and for some strange reason variety wasn’t in the packed menu plan. Wieners and beans, and ham and lima beans.

  “Cracker,” I asked, watching my C ration of ham and lima beans cook over a piece of C-4 explosive, “what the hell? Was this all you could pack?”

  “That’s all that was in supply bunker, man,” he said with a shrug. “Dick and beans and ham and motherfuckers. Sorry, man. Pretend it’s a steak.”

  It was later that day. I heard the pop of the AK-47. We all hit the ground and rolled under the nearest cover. Except for Rick. As I was falling, I saw Rick jerk back and forth in a weird kind of dance, saw a red tulip sprout over his chest. That gook was a stupid sniper. He kept firing as though he were hell-bent on pumping an entire magazine into Rick. I rolled over twice and brought my rifle up to where I’d seen the flash. What looked like a mass of vines around a branch was really a man. The first bullet must have caught him in the throat. We heard a gurgle and what seemed to be a deep breath that ended in a hysterical sigh. I emptied a magazine into the guy, and only then did he fall to the ground. As though I’d shot a roosting grouse.

  “Stay down!” I hissed when I saw Marv try to reach for Rick. I heard Cracker Jack radio in for help. I was so sure that there were more of them out there and that we were all going to get wasted. But nothing happened. I could not believe it was one lone bastard firing at us. And I didn’t believe it. But for some strange reason they didn’t consider us worth opening a fight over. Normally I would have crept ahead and checked my aim, checked the body for anything that might be of use. Maps, pictures, even what uniform he was wearing. But Marv was gasping as though he could not get enough air.

  After Rick was killed, Marv would just stare off into space, and sometimes I had to thump him on the back to make him pay attention. Marv was the guy responsible for painting “Elvis” on my helmet, not only making me a visible target for a mile but costing me a dressing down because it targeted everyone else as well. He painted it over for me. He laughed a lot. He made us laugh a lot. Until Rick was shot. He kept hugging the body bag that Rick was in, and I thought I’d have to break his arms so that he’d let go, let them load Rick onto an H-34 copter and take him home.

  Marv cried for a long time, off and on at night. It seemed to help him, but it got to me and made me feel pissed instead of sad.

  There were two nights near Christmas when it was so quiet we held our breath to make sure it was as silent as it seemed. I shouldn’t say quiet. The bugs made a lot of noise in the jungle around the base, but we accepted it, like the buzzing of mosquitoes, as part of the regular noise.

  Around Christmas Marv got a guitar from some black-market papa-san. I don’t know how he did it or what he traded it for in the Khe Sanh village, but it was a fairly decent guitar. I didn’t even know he could play. One night I was reading and lying on top of some sandbags inside our bunker. Marv took out his forbidden guitar and began to sing softly.

  “What’s that?” I asked, not recognizing the song.

  He stopped. “You really are from the backwoods, aren’t you?” he said. Marv was from Philadelphia. “There is other music in the world. Have you heard of the Beatles?”

  “Shut up. Of course I have.”

  “What about Beethoven?”

  “Now you can really shut the fuck up there. My mother loves Beethoven. My mother used to be a teacher. She went to a private college in Milwaukee. Shit. I grew up listening to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy. You know. The classics.”

  “The classics.” He smirked. “Where did you go wrong?”

  I threw an empty beer can at him. He ducked and laughed. It was good to hear him laugh again after what happened to Rick. Then he started to sing.

  Hello darkness, my old friend,

  I’ve come to talk with you again,

  Because a vision softly creeping,

  Left its seeds while I was sleeping,

  And the vision that was planted in my brain

  Still remains

  Within the sound of silence.

  That was the first time I really paid attention to Simon and Garfunkel. That song stuck to me. For the rest of January I sang it under
my breath like a prayer.

  I THOUGHT 1967 WOULD NEVER END. December held with such ferocity that it became officially memorable, creating temperatures and conditions that meteorologists would use as a yardstick in the coming years. The winter began with an avalanche of snow from the November skies and unusually large gales on Lake Superior. When December came, the temperature became a steady twenty-five degrees below zero. The wind only made it worse, possessing the days with its icy force and torturing even such winter-hardy animals as coyotes, sometimes forcing them to find shelter in a surprised farmer’s hay barn.

  Then January 1968 arrived, and it cracked open that cold blue sky. A warm and wet wind came out of Canada and gave northern Wisconsin a most startling midwinter thaw. The chickadees sang their spring love songs and collected twigs and exposed grass for building nests. I hung laundry outside one day. After pinning the last shirt to the line, I turned into the wind and let my bathrobe flap open.

  When we moved up from Milwaukee to this 250-acre farm-stead filled with swamps, rocks, and pines in northern Wisconsin seventeen years ago, I didn’t know the history or understand why the land was so cheap. I didn’t think to ask Emil and Anna Hausherr because it was clear they had been happy here. We moved near a town with a Swedish woman’s name, Olina, even though almost everyone was German in origin. I went from being surrounded by people, close to most of my own family and friends, to nearly complete isolation. Not only isolation but also a journey back into time.

  The rural area of Olina was inhabited by the grandsons and granddaughters of immigrants who had been lied to by the Department of Agriculture and the lumber industry. By the time they discovered the logged-over soil and cold temperatures could not support big farming, they had drained all their savings and had no money to leave. Their children and the children after them learned to live on very little, and it became a twisted kind of life. They stoically toughed it out and spent their Sunday mornings listening to Father Wallace intone the master plan of God and pontificate his own views that people often brought tragedy upon themselves because of their lack of, or their misguided, spiritual lives. By Father Wallace’s definition, sinners were people who did not conform to Olina’s standards and traditions, the main tradition being depression. It was a sin, for example, to expect or want happiness. To expect love. I went to church because it had been fed to me since birth and had become as instinctual as breathing. I was afraid that if I missed a mass, something terrible would happen. It was a kind of voodoo that my mother had frightened me into believing, and she had done a good job. Although I sat in the pew and listened, I refused to believe that bad things happened only to people the church saw or defined as sinful.