The Turtle Warrior

by Mary Relindes Ellis

  Actually I was running after Lieutenant Miller, who got a sudden case of buck fever. I knew he had stood up too soon, and I ran after him to knock him to the ground. He insisted that we charge the hill and reclaim it and proved it by being the first one. We only had one M-60 and not enough linked ammo for it. My M-16 kept jamming. I hated that fuckin’ gun. No matter how many times I cleaned it, took it apart, and put it back together, that damn thing jammed if you breathed on it. I wanted an M-14, but they wouldn’t give us any. I would have given anything for the Marlin I’d left at home. Our column had moved west on the hill in dense fog. Then, early in the afternoon, the fog lifted like a curtain on a stage, and we were surrounded by a mean audience of the NVA. We were too few in number and should have retreated until we got more reinforcements, but our orders were to stay. Miller took a round in the chest and another in his head. I felt a spray of something on my face, and then I tripped over him as he fell. I got up and tried to wipe my eyes so I could see, but it was as though I’d covered them with grease. Then I looked down at my hands, and the gray greasy stuff covering my hands and my face was from Miller’s head. I freaked out, and instead of running backward, I ran forward.

  Cracker Jack had radioed in for air support when we realized the joke of our position in the clearing fog. I could barely hear him. The last thing I heard was Cracker Jack yelling:

  “Ricky-tick! Most fuckin’ ricky-tick!”

  Some help did come from overhead. An F-4 Phantom suddenly appeared and dropped the napalm that rose like a giant arm of fire. The napalm that hit me.

  I wondered: How is it I can still hear myself? How is it I can still think? I didn’t see or hear Lieutenant Miller. I was floating in the sky, but I existed. I was conscious of being.

  Just as I watched and felt my body tear apart, I then felt something else. A gathering of my senses. As though the invisible molecules that had belonged to me came together again. I remained above Khe Sanh for a day, saw the A-4 Skyhawks and the F-4s as they shelled around our sister Hill 881S and around the perimeter of the Khe Sanh Combat Base. There was a shitload of the NVA out there, but even with heavy bombing, they were hard to find. It didn’t matter how many of them were killed by bombs. Ol’ General Giap always had more. He opened his platoons like cages so that like an endless supply of mice, they kept coming and coming and coming.

  Eventually everything that was green and beautiful would be bombed beyond recognition. The dead NVA soldiers would simmer and bloat in the sun, peel away and rot in the rain. The smell would be god-awful, like the spring pileup of winter kill from a large lake during a hard winter.

  We were hunkered down on Hill 881S on the night before I bought it and joking about the movie we’d miss on Saturday night: Paradise, Hawaiian Style.

  “Ha!” Marv said with a grin. “We are in a movie. Paradise Khe Sanh Style.”

  “Fuck,” Charlie Matheson said, “some paradise. Did you guys see Miss January?”

  “The oh yeah, oh yeah Miss January that you left back at the base? How could you leave Miss January?” Marv joked. “We could use her pillows right now. Imagine resting your head on those babies.”

  They laughed for a while and then were quiet. I crawled over to where Lieutenant Miller was sitting alone. Brooding. He asked me if I thought the sensors were off, that maybe there weren’t that many NVAs because they weren’t visible from the air.

  I puckered my lips like some of the righteous old women I’d grown up with and pretended to be shocked. “You mean the sensors that we’re not supposed to know about?”

  He laughed, and it made me feel good that I had cheered him up. It was supposedly top secret. But come on. All those Air Force jets dropping something in December and January. Something that we could barely see and that didn’t explode. It was clearly intelligence equipment of some kind, and it was more accurate than counting piles of elephant shit. Since we couldn’t stand up on patrol and yell, “Okay. Time’s up. How many of you little yellow fuckers are out there?” there had to be a way they knew the NVA was massing up. They always assumed that we couldn’t figure it out. But we knew. The Bru tribe of highland people that picked over the food in the base’s garbage dump suddenly disappeared the week before we bivouacked on Hill 881S. If you didn’t have to fight, then was the time to get the hell out. Miller found out what it was they dropped even though it was supposedly classified. The equipment was called ASIDS. Air-delivered seismic intrusion devices. In other words, tiny microphones draped over tree branches that detected enemy sound and movement. Did that sound like James Bond or what? How lucky we were. Even John Wayne never had ASIDS.

  It always pissed me off when our own higher-ups thought we were stupid. I think when some of those officers work their way to the top, they lose their fighting intuition. They had experience but no sense. Hell, they lost all five of them and often that extra sense that comes from fear. Your face buried in mud, your knees pulled up to your chest, your neck hunched down. Squeezing your eyes shut against tears and praying that your flak jacket and helmet would do what they said they would: protect you from flying shrapnel. I felt like I had eyes in the back of my head. Just like Mom did when she caught me doing something and I couldn’t figure how the hell she saw me or knew. There was never just one NVA. If you saw one, you calculated fifty to that one.

  “You know we never get an accurate description,” I said. “Those five officers that were shot just after New Year’s were wearing uniforms that look a lot like ours.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but you’ve been out there. What do you think?”

  I thought about the green hills around us and what it must have been like for the Bru and the other Yard tribes who lived there a hundred, maybe two hundred years ago. How Kho’s family found everything to eat, in addition to the rice they grew, in those hills. What I would do if I had been born there.

  “I think that they know this fuckin’ place a lot better than we do.”

  I tried to stay above the smoke filling the sky. I remembered thinking how much it looked like the smoke spewed out of the stacks from the Wilson paper mill. I looked down at all my friends. I knew the stubbornness of those guys, and I was both proud and pissed at them. They would look for me no matter what. Even if it killed them just looking for my dog tags. I also knew that they’d stay trenched in that shithole known officially as the KSCB until they were ordered out. Some of us called it Private Piles’ Plateau. Just like a bad case of hemorrhoids, the base would bleed and bleed until almost no one was left.

  I could look down and see it all. What many of us had suspected was true. We were fuckin’ bait for a battle that never should have been. Those fuckin’ old men in Washington didn’t give a shit about us and argued while we sat there. Some of our own COs were trying to move some asses to protect us, but they were in the field too and a long way from Washington. All that reading I did about the history of Vietnam paid off. I put it together. It was about history. About losing a garrison and losing face like the French did with Dienbienphu. While General West-who-wanted-More-Land argued for his chance to invade Laos and then Cambodia—the Big Time, we called it—with Johnson, we didn’t get the supplies we needed because the NVA had cut off Route 9 and everything had to be flown in. That was blood in the eyes too. Our airstrip had become a kill zone. Any pilot who could land and take off without being hit by a mortar round was not just close to God. He was God. It seemed like every other copter that tried to land on the airstrip was doomed to be shot out of the sky.

  That short period of time around Christmas when we went into the village and went to a restaurant that everybody called Howard Johnson’s was just that: short. Everything after that went downhill. We were ordered to wear our flak jackets and helmets at all times.

  Early the next day we were told to move toward Hill 881 N because it had been taken by the NVA and we were to help Bravo Company take it back. Just before we started humping through elephant grass to the other hill, Cracker Jack surprised all of us when he pull
ed out a miniature Bible with pieces of paper stuck in it. He had a deep voice when he became serious. His voice could make a sick Yard baby stop crying. It came right up through your feet and into your head. A rocking chair voice. He began to read, our medic turned Baptist minister.

  “Young men, listen to me as you would your father. Listen, and grow wise, for I speak the truth—don’t turn away. For I too was once a son, tenderly loved by my mother as an only child and the companion of my father. He told me never to forget his words. ‘If you follow them,’ he said, ‘you will have a long and happy life. Learn to be wise,’ he said, ‘and develop good judgment and common sense! I cannot overemphasize this point.’ Cling to wisdom—she will protect you. Love her—she will guard you.”

  Cracker Jack said it was a proverb of Solomon. His namesake. If anyone else had read it, I would have said it was bullshit. I’d never listen to my old man. But it was comforting coming from Cracker Jack. For a week we had that awful feeling of being sitting ducks. Of being cut off and not wanted. Charlie Matheson was right when he said we were orphanage kids on a government camping trip, left behind on purpose.

  I watched Cracker Jack’s back as we walked in a column through the grass, and I noticed the ripple of muscle above the collar of his jacket at the back of his neck. I’d believe in God again, I thought, if Cracker Jack was my minister.

  None of it mattered anymore when I looked down at all of it. I was a fastball of energy. At the end of that day I realized that I could will myself to move. That I could go anywhere I wanted to.

  I wanted to go home.

  IN THE IMMEDIATE DAYS THAT followed, Claire and Bill experienced nightly sleep absent of any sensation or movement. They did not speak of it to each other. At daybreak Bill crawled toward the surface of consciousness. He struggled to open his eyes, and when his eyes did open to the light, all the swollen visions of his brother entered, so he shut them. His mother must have felt the same way because it was noon before she roused herself and Bill out of bed. The phone went unanswered. The one time his mother picked up the receiver, it was the priest asking her about holding a mass.

  “You can say a prayer for him or dedicate a mass to him. But we just can’t attend right now.”

  Bill became aware that other people knew because of the cars that drove slowly into their driveway for a week afterward. Their various neighbors discreetly left casseroles, potato bread, cakes, Swiss steak, frozen vegetables, jam, venison sausage, and other food wedged between the screen door and the storm door.

  During that week Bill and Claire sat at the kitchen table in a silent stupor from noon until suppertime. Only then did his mother rise and heat some of the food left on the porch. She filled her plate but did not eat, nursing a cup of coffee instead. Her bloodshot eyes watched Bill’s hands as they moved the food from his plate to his mouth. All that could be heard was the sound Bill made chewing his food. On Sunday night he put his fork down midway through the meal.

  “I missed school this week. Can I stay home tomorrow too?”

  “No.” Her voice sounded strangled. “I want you to go to school tomorrow.”

  “Bill—” she began more fluidly—“Your brother is—”

  “No,” Bill shook his head. He stared at his mother, silently raging at her easy acquiescence. At her betrayal of his brother. “You don’t know.”

  Bill could confidently maintain his belief during the day. It was the night that frightened him. He fell into a deep but strange sleep. Whatever lived under the bed, whatever had pinched his toes had moved up his legs. He could not open his eyes to see what it was, to cry out for help because his sleep was like being beneath water. Every time he neared the surface to break it, he saw a glowing light before something pulled him down. One night he tied a corner of his brother’s white crocheted bedspread to the bedpost on his brother’s headboard and stretched it across the room to his own bed. He held a loose corner in his fist. It was the only way he could go to sleep. But when he woke up in the mornings, he had a burning sensation in his groin, and with deep shame, he discovered he had wet the bed.

  Like everything else his brother had touched or used, the bedspread that had once covered him cloaked Bill with its growing imaginary powers. He cut off some of the fringe bordering the bedspread and put it into a small leather pouch. He carried the pouch with him in his pants pocket. If he was struggling through another bad day at school, Bill would discreetly shove his hand into his pocket and hold the leather pouch with the tips of his fingers.

  In the weeks after the news, Bill’s father was almost never home. When he did make an appearance, it was to raise his big bark-peeling fists. John Lucas walked, talked, and even slept as though he’d been permanently wronged. Bill had never been able to determine what cross his father had to bear when his life appeared to be identical to that of other men in Olina. Men who worked even harder but who did not drink or beat their wives. Bill did not understand why his father, so apparently aggrieved with having to support a family, did not run off like so many men who discovered that wanting and having a family meant working for one. But John Lucas doggedly stayed as if to punish them. Even with overtime pay at the mill, he barely earned a living and spent a third of those earnings on the beer and liquor he consumed at Pete’s Bar or kept stashed in numerous hiding places all over their farm. He drank with the unmistakable aura of defeat that hours later would ferment and bubble up to his brain as a killing rage.

  Bill thought it was common for all fathers to get so angry until he started school and discovered otherwise. He intuited that most mothers did not wear sunglasses on cloudy days or all day long. He listened to the chatter of the other children as they related what their parents had done and with whom, the vacations they went on as families and the TV shows they all watched. The other mothers belonged to bridge groups or baked cakes and cookies for the church’s bake sales.

  The awareness pushed him out of the garden of his imagination and simultaneously caused him to dwell deeper in it. He had only one clear memory from the year he was six years old, a memory so permanently fixed in his consciousness that not even denial overrode it.

  Sitting on the staircase. It was night, and he was looking down through the railing bars at his parents. His father had pinned his mother’s arms and hands above her head on the floor with his left hand while his right hand waved the blunt tip of a screwdriver above her face. Her yellow housedress was bunched up around her waist. Bill could see the purple grooves of garter marks in the white skin of her thighs. Saw the tears streaming into her black hair and heard the odd rasping sound from her mouth. His father’s pants were down around his calves. One booted foot covered his mother’s bare ankle and the black dirt from the sole looked like pepper on her toes. Bill shook. Not knowing what else to do, he let loose a wail reminiscent of an ambulance siren. It caused his father to turn around and loosen his hold on Bill’s mother. She threw the big man off-balance and struggled to her feet. In her frantic run up the stairs, she swept down and grabbed Bill under his armpits, dragging him with her until she reached the top. His brother, awakened by Bill’s cry, ran out of their bedroom just in time to see their mother carry Bill into the bathroom and lock the door.

  “Jimmy! He’s gonna kill me!” she screamed through the door while Bill hunched down in the corner by the toilet. He peed involuntarily, and it pooled underneath his butt cheeks, soaking his pajama bottoms.

  His brother was sixteen then but nearly full grown at six feet three. He stood at the top of the stairs and watched as their father attempted to climb the steps. Bill held his breath, and even his mother became silent, pressing her head against the door. They could hear his brother’s voice through the door. It was his deadliest voice. Even and quiet.

  “Better stop right there. Or I’ll beat the shit outta you if you come up here,” his brother said. “And you know I can do it.”

  They heard John Lucas stumble back down the steps. Listened as he groped through the unlit kitchen for the back porch d
oor, opening and slamming it with such force that the tremors shook the beams up in the bathroom.

  Bill’s mother pulled him out of the corner and picked him up by the waist like a sackful of chicken feed. She carried him out of the bathroom and into her bedroom. She dropped him before standing in front of the window but kept one clenched and trembling hand wound in the fabric of Bill’s pajama top, pulling his small chest out at a painful angle. Bill watched as she rested her forehead against the glass and began weeping.