The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  He stayed in the reserves as an act of contrition, a penance for what he witnessed, and to do the best he could as a chaplain and a casualty officer in notifying families. He was a United States Naval Chaplain, assigned, as all Naval Chaplains were, to the Marine Corps for duty. The Marines did not want anyone but someone from the Corps itself or from the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps to notify the families. In all the sickness that was Vietnam, it was one of the few things that made sense. It was a perverse kind of honesty that he could not help admiring. If the Marine Corps took sons and husbands, if those sons and husbands died, then the Corps had an obligation and a duty to see it through to the end. If there was anger or hatred, it was to be absorbed by the Corps as well.

  “Your son was in the Fifth Marine Division and a member of India Company, Third Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines. The Fifth Marine Division was based near Laos at the Khe Sanh Combat Base. India Company was aiding the Fifth Division, Bravo Company, in trying to regain control of a hill called Eight-eighty-one North when they encountered a heavy concentration of North Vietnamese. Apparently the reports were in error about the number of enemy forces there although they knew the NVA was building up. They just didn’t know how many or where and when they could expect some action.”

  He paused. He wanted her to sit down. Hildebrandt had the uncomfortable feeling that she was taller than he was and that she actually looked down at him. He was prepared for any kind of reaction, as was Schlessinger. One father had threatened them with a shotgun, but most often they were either greeted with strained silence or engulfed with hysterical hugs from grieving family members.

  “Khe Sanh isn’t that far from the DMZ. In Vietnam the DMZ is an allied military term. The Vietnamese call it the highlands, and it is hilly country, some of it covered with jungle that is extremely dense. It is suppose to be a demilitarized zone according to the Geneva Convention, but nothing in Vietnam goes by the Geneva Convention.”

  The other officer coughed.

  “There is a tribe of people that live in the highlands that are not considered to be Vietnamese by either the North or the South. They know that area better than anyone, and they are allies of the United States.”

  They are called the Montagnards, he nearly added. He would never forget the Montagnards. They were the smallest people he’d ever seen, with tribal markings on some of their faces. They were persecuted and unwanted by the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese called them moi. Savages. The Marines and other Special Forces units relied upon the Montagnards for intelligence and for guiding them through elephant grass, through jungle and plant cover so heavy that an average-size American was handicapped. Almost all of the men referred to them affectionately as the Yards. Yard scouts were essential. They could spot NVA booby traps. Modified grenades camouflaged in the vines. The vines would swing with their fatal fruit into a soldier’s face or chest, detonating upon impact. Punji stakes and pits. He often visited several Yard villages with one of the medics and assisted in giving vaccinations and cleaning up minor shrapnel wounds. They were not of Vietnamese or Chinese descent and they consisted of several tribal groups, each with a specific name. They were in fact the indigenous people of Vietnam. The American Indians of Vietnam.

  Schlessinger coughed again.

  “On January twentieth, the Fifth Marine Division stormed the western side of Hill Eight-eighty-one North. The commanding officer was killed. Your son was running after his CO when they last saw him. Until we can verify his death, we cannot officially say that he was killed, and so he is listed as missing in action. I have brought you a copy of the official report. His trunk with his personal belongings is being sent from Okinawa.”

  He placed an envelope on the table.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lucas. On behalf of the United States Navy Chaplain Corps and the United States Marine Corps, I’m very sorry.”

  It was selfish, but he hoped she wouldn’t ask any questions. Hildebrandt was exhausted. What he was prevented from telling her, and could not tell her, was that an F-4 Phantom had dropped a load of napalm so close to the Marines on Hill 881N that it was likely that her son had been caught in it and roasted alive. He prayed that Private Lucas had been shot before that happened. That he had died before being burned. Otherwise her son would have danced like a mythical but crazed fairy in the woods, glowing with flames.

  I couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying. Jungle. Jimmy wrote home about the jungle, how it was thicker than the thickest forest we had here at home, how it was unbelievably humid and full of bugs almost as big as his hand. How frogs, bugs, and fish were eaten by some of the rural people called the Yards. How they scavenged through the combat base’s dump for food and how they even ate rats. How the jungle camouflaged some of the deadliest snakes in the world and how at night they sometimes heard the chattering of monkeys and once the roaring of a tiger. I read between the lines of his letters: the suffocating terror my son thought he was concealing. His letters to Bill were somewhat guarded even if they said a bit more. He never directly wrote of anything bad happening except for the death of his friend. Maybe this was military policy. Never tell your mother the truth.

  I tilted my head to one side like a chickadee. Missing in action. Had I heard right?

  “They can’t find him?” I felt myself begin to descend.

  “Not yet.”

  “There must be a way!” My voice rose while the rest of me came down. Something had gotten hold of my ankles. I was not dropping but was being steadily pulled down.

  “Mrs. Lucas,” Lieutenant Hildebrandt answered, his voice so low that it fluctuated with hesitancy and made it hard for me to hear him, “I know this is terrible news. The Marines never leave their casualties behind even at the risk of losing more men in retrieving the dead. They will keep looking until they find your son.”

  Ernie leaned forward. “He’s right, Claire. Jimmy may have been taken prisoner. He’s missing in action. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he is dead. His division will find him. They will search until they have exhausted all their options.”

  Whatever it was gave me a quick yank, and I came down the rest of the way into a tintinnabulation of pain. Eight months ago in the early June heat, I had stood on the cracked asphalt of the Standard station in Olina and watched my eighteen-year-old son board the Greyhound bus. He hugged me so hard that my feet left the ground. I felt his heart beat as though it were straining to escape his ribs and get back inside me. I couldn’t think of what advice to give him. And now it was too late. I should have whispered, “Stay scared and run like a rabbit.”

  I expected him to come back. If not a live son, then a dead son. That was part of the unspeakable deal. He had to come home either way. It had never occurred to me that he would simply vanish. That he would be missing. I needed his body. To kiss Jimmy’s eyes shut like I used to do when he was a small boy being tucked into bed, telling him that my kisses would prevent bad dreams. I thought of Bill upstairs. How was I going to explain to my younger son that his brother was missing, that the only evidence we had of him were words hanging in the air and typed on a piece of paper?

  I stared past Ernie at Lieutenant Hildebrandt, at the small crucifix pinned to his uniform jacket.

  “This is easy for you,” I replied hoarsely. “You’re a priest or a chaplain or whatever. You don’t have to carry a gun. You are,” I said meanly, wanting to poke him in the chest, “safe.”

  Ernie intervened. “Do you and Bill want to stay with us?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to call John?”

  “No.”

  I heard a sound from upstairs.

  “You can go now. All of you, please.”

  The men awkwardly stood up from their chairs. The chaplain was red as though he’d been sunburned.

  The two officers left the house, but Ernie hesitated at the door. I looked at him, and it dawned on me that our neighbor actually knew Jimmy was missing before I did.

  “How did you know?” I
asked.

  He turned around. “I knew because Jimmy had listed me as the first contact on his record of emergency form. And he requested that I come with them. I don’t think he wanted you to take this alone.”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Call us, Claire. Let us help you.”

  I shook my head. I had nothing to say, and I felt there was nothing they could do to help us.

  Then Ernie left too.

  I waited until I heard them start their engines, and I watched from the storm door as Ernie did a U-turn in the yard so that he could head back down the driveway, followed by the dark blue sedan.

  Once they cleared the Lucas driveway, Schlessinger started.

  “What is wrong with you? You are never supposed to tell them all that. You keep doing this. You better hope she doesn’t call Quantico.”

  Hildebrandt could still feel her voice, gravelly and rough. The verbal finger jabbed into his forehead.

  He suddenly remembered the first lengthy conversation he had had with Private Marcus, a beachboy blond twenty-year-old who had come to Vietnam happy-go-lucky and had joined Hildebrandt’s company as a sole survivor of battalion that was, as Marcus put it, annihilated. Marcus would never be happy or pretty again. The one piece of shrapnel that hit him had sliced into his face and barely missed his right eye. The burned and jagged scar that ran from the outside of his right eye curved slightly down and then across his right cheek, denting one nostril of his nose. It was a million-dollar wound. He could have gone home. But he refused because a facial wound was nothing compared with the vengeance he wanted to seek.

  Marcus was a renegade. The Marines tolerated him because he was an excellent reconnaissance and point man. They overlooked his deviations from what would have been deemed appropriate Marine behavior, although even Hildebrandt had to admit that being based at Khe Sanh was so uncertain that there was no such thing as appropriate behavior, even for a priest at times. He’d seen the Special Forces men who were on their second and sometimes third tours, some of them silent and brooding after spending so much time in the highlands, wary of anything that remotely resembled civilization and wary of prolonged conversation. Their eyes appeared huge inside the frames of their faces until he realized that some of them were dilated. He didn’t know what they had swallowed, only that it made them spooky. They did not want him or need him. The Marines he worked with appeared normal in comparison, and they avoided the long-range reconnaissance patrol men as much as Hildebrandt did. Most of the men regarded Hildebrandt’s presence as chaplain essential, and he had a warm relationship with most of them. But not Marcus.

  Hildebrandt watched as the twenty-year-old swallowed a handful of Dexedrine and chased the pills with a long drink of beer. Hildebrandt considered it ironic that Marcus swallowed a fistful of speed with the very thing that would slow it down.

  “Let me ask you somethin’, Hildebrandt. Or should I say Father Hildebrandt? How can you believe in God after seeing this shit? Did you ever stop to consider that God sent his only son down to earth, knowing they were going to kill him? What father does that? What right did he have to send his kid? Why the hell didn’t he have the balls to come down to earth himself? Tell me, Father Hildebrandt—” Marcus sneered before leaning back for another swallow of beer, “how you can believe in such fucked-up shit as that?”

  “That’s the mystery of it, Marcus,” he answered lamely. “We just have to believe He knew what He was doing.”

  Marcus stared at him. “Mystery, huh?” he commented. He got up and tossed the beer can so that it nearly struck Hildebrandt in the head. “Is that what you’re gonna tell the next guy who gets his brains spilled? Or his mother?”

  Marcus lowered his voice and made it go Dragnet flat. “Sorry, ma’am. Your son’s head was blown off. It’s a mystery.”

  Then Marcus lit a joint. “You’re a piece of work.” He laughed sarcastically.

  “Tell me somethin’,” he added, speaking through his teeth so as to keep the hit of smoke in as long as possible. He exhaled. “Are you a man of God who can fuck women or one of those who can’t? Or maybe,” he added with a sneer, “you don’t even like women.”

  His laughter trailed after him as he walked away. Just as the smoke from his joint did. Taunting solidified by the sweet and nauseating smell of dew.

  Two days later he watched as Marcus dug trenches with the rest of Bravo Company and they uncovered a mass grave, part of which was old and part of which still carried a heavy stench of rotting corpses. Almost all of them wore pieces of cloth or handkerchiefs tied around their noses and mouths. Some of them vomited before they could rip the cloths from their faces. Hildebrandt wore one too. Marcus was the only one who didn’t wear a cloth. Hildebrandt thought it was because Marcus’s fragment wounds had damaged his sense of smell. Later that day he watched as Marcus squatted down near the perimeter of the base camp, just inside the razor wire, and rocked back and forth on his feet. Humming. Hildebrandt turned to Lieutenant Abramson.

  “Can’t you order him to stay away from there? What about that sniper?”

  “That gook’s cock is off. He can’t hit a damn thing. I could order him, but Marcus wouldn’t obey me. He doesn’t give a shit about command. And he likes that little gook. Although,” Abramson remarked casually, “Marcus might just get it into his head to take that little shit out. On the very principle that he shoots so badly and shouldn’t be called a sniper at all.”

  They heard the shot in the middle of the night. Hildebrandt was shaken awake, and he stumbled into a wall of sandbags in his effort to keep up with the medic. At first he thought the NVA sniper had finally succeeded. Marcus was lying in the same place by the razor wire that he had been the day before. But it wasn’t the NVA sniper. His own .45 had instantly killed him. His palate was split, and the back of his skull blown open. Two privates lifted and carried him away from the razor wire, running awkwardly with the body until they were behind the protection of sandbags.

  Just before he made the sign of the cross and began to recite the last rites, Hildebrandt stopped. He had no idea what Marcus’s first name was.

  “Steven,” Abramson said.

  There could be no last confession, no completion of earthly affairs. Even the last rites Hildebrandt had been taught to practice underwent a kind of triage to fit any and all situations. There was the long version that included extreme unction, the short version, and what he thought of as the flying-by-the-pants version, otherwise known as cases of special need. He began with verses 14 and 15 of James V “Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him.”

  “Into thy hands, Lord, I commend the spirit of Steven Marcus. Please receive his spirit.”

  He paused.

  “Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of mercy, protect thy son, Steven Marcus, from the enemy and receive him at his hour of death.”

  Hildebrandt watched himself go through the motions of sending the dead to God, knowing that Marcus would have sneered at the ritual, that Marcus had achieved what he had wanted all along. He was no longer the survivor of his battalion. With his death, they all were annihilated.

  There was something about Claire Lucas. He thought about her face. The whiteness of it. The dark circles under her eyes and her skinny neck. Just before she verbally jabbed him, she had moved slightly as if to poke him physically too. The top two buttons on her faded housedress were unbuttoned, and the right side limply flapped open. She was such a thin woman that he remembered thinking that it was strange he couldn’t see her clavicle. The skin was purple there. He had dismissed it earlier as a birthmark.

  He placed his right hand on the dashboard and lowered his head. He had seen the gross manifestation of bullet-torn flesh, spurting blood, heads blown open by grenades, legs and arms that twitched after being severed. Finger
s that closed and opened on a lone hand in the middle of a road while Vietnamese women bicycled past. Holding a bandage on a severed artery in a soldier’s groin. The blood left the body with such force that it spurted over his fingers at first. He recognized the butterfly fluttering of the eyelids and the gradual relaxing of the jaws signifying the slow loss of consciousness as the man bled out. Being back in the States for a year hadn’t touched that deadening of the senses to horror. Until now. He missed it because it had become a regular feature on the human body in Vietnam and an acceptable aspect of war. But he was home now, and he saw what was supposed to be unacceptable in his own culture. The deep bruise of a punch. The swelling that hid the beauty of a woman’s collarbone.

  Hildebrandt lifted his hand, clenched it, and hit the dashboard with his fist.

  “Don’t tell me what to say! See this?” He pushed his thumb underneath his lapel so that his chaplain’s insignia was thrust forward. “I’m not supposed to lie! I’m fucking sick of lying to people. I am the chaplain! I’m supposed to tell the truth. I’m going to tell the fucking truth! That woman,” he continued yelling, “was not stupid! She knew! She has nothing! Nothing!”

  Schlessinger had been about to apologize for his own outburst when Hildebrandt went off. He had never heard Hildebrandt swear and had never seen him so angry. He was simultaneously startled and remorseful. Just as he was about to attempt another apology, Hildebrandt shocked him by suddenly weeping.

  Schlessinger pulled into the Morriseau driveway, parked the sedan, and got out. Hildebrandt could hear him thanking Mr. Morriseau. Could hear him making apologies for Hildebrandt’s absence. Hildebrandt kept his face down. He could not get out of the car.

  They drove in silence the rest of the way to Madison.

  Thirty miles into their road trip Hildebrandt realized that Marcus had spoken a truth that Hildebrandt refused to acknowledge to himself. Since landing in Nam, he didn’t believe in God. If he had gone through the motions of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it was to ease the men against the very real knowledge that they were fighting for nothing but some old men’s dreams of winning the invisible. There were no holy wars. There was nothing but money and games and betrayal at the top. But at ground level, out there, brotherhood was at its finest. They would die protecting each other. He could believe in that.