Walking Wounded

by Chris Lynch

  But now, in the air again and on our way to California, it feels like me and Rudi again and that much is good.

  He’s an excellent listener.

  “That was one irregular guy, that Lieutenant Grafe, huh? But it was very nice, the treatment you got. Good to remember that somebody cares, isn’t it?”

  I have relaxed enough, in our privacy, that I am actually leaning with both elbows on top of the coffin. Like I’m home already and ordering a butter-crunch ice cream at Brigham’s. It is not the correct way to do this job, and I know that. It is the correct way with Rudi, in private. It is exactly the way he would want it, and I know that, too.

  The three-man crew has been all but invisible to us the whole time. I suspect invisibility is a key skill with this particular duty.

  “Somebody in the military, that is. Rudi, man, pretty soon we’ll be seeing a bunch of people who care a whole lot. Your mom,” I say, suddenly sucking in air as if I’ve startled myself. “My mom … Ah, jeez, Rude, Ivan’s folks.”

  I shove myself up off the coffin and start pacing, because it doesn’t feel like the casual ice-cream-parlor chat it was.

  “I’m so scared, pal,” I say, pacing faster. I walk away from him, use up the whole twenty feet of empty pace-space, pivot, come back to him. I do this mechanically, up and down and up like the fake rabbit they use to drive dogs nutty at the greyhound track at Wonderland.

  Every time I reach Rudi’s end, I touch the top of the box, pat it, rub it, just making contact.

  “This is the hardest thing ever,” I say. “How do I do this? I really wish Beck were here with us because then he’d for sure work it out. Or at least help me to slow it down and make it make sense.

  “Which, right, makes no sense at all. Maybe it’s better he’s not here, because making this make sense makes no sense. It’s so … unreal. Doesn’t it feel like that, Rude? Anyway, thanks for listening. I feel better. Well, not really. But yeah. I could only ever go to Beck for real advice and stuff.”

  I am at the Rudi end of my circuit when I stop short, my hand flat on the top of his coffin.

  “But now I have you,” I say. “And it’s good I can talk to you, before I get home. Because if I couldn’t ever say it out loud, I think I would probably go all psychiatric discharge all over the place. Thanks. You’re a good boy. Always were a good boy.

  “I just had to talk to somebody who knows,” I say, beginning my pacing again. But I get only four paces into it before my knees lock and I go statuesque. I reverse field and walk myself to Rudi’s side again, put both my hands on the lid and lean low to him.

  “Do you know?” I say, getting a shiver like there are small rats running up and down my spine. “What do you know, exactly, old pal?”

  Just when the heavy, awful thing was lifting a bit, it comes back down heavier when I think about the very things I least want to think about.

  “Aren’t you supposed to suddenly have all the wisdom of the world when you die? So that all knowledge and understanding comes together and everything makes sense? Well, I think between here and home I’m going to need you to give me as much of that as you can manage, old buddy.”

  I haven’t laughed this much since high school. May not be saying too much since I just about stopped laughing from the time I left that place.

  All the wisdom of the world.

  Well, um, no.

  Morris should accompany everybody home. He’s the best guy, the best guy to do it because he’s a gentleman and he doesn’t make you feel like a jerk unless he absolutely has to, and whether or not he is smarter than you or tougher than you or cooler than you or richer than you or not dead like you or anything, he doesn’t act like it. Whoever you are with Morris, he makes you feel less bad about it than anybody else ever would. Which is why he should be the guy for everybody’s gentle journey.

  And yeah, being handled by people with respect feels too nice to ever not notice. If I knew I could have gotten that treatment I would have gotten my brains shot out a lot of years ago.

  Remember I used to cry all the time? Feels now like I have come all the way back to the me of then. Maybe that’s what happens. It’s like getting kept back times a zillion. Come this far and I’m still getting kept back. Hey, ha, maybe that means I’m in hell. Ha.

  Still, maybe I got off easier than everybody else.

  Probably more than maybe.

  We are only a few miles now from reaching the base at Pleiku, and am I ever happy to be nearing home.

  The attacks have gotten progressively worse all along the whole of Highway 19. Charlie, VC, NVA, who knows, maybe the Chinese and the Russians, too, are planted out there in the cover along the trail, because there is heavy, heavy firepower raining down on us. It’s as if the entirety of the opposition forces has decided there is nothing more important at this juncture than stopping this very convoy from delivering anything at all to Pleiku.

  But they have to. They have to deliver me.

  Our adversaries are well on their way to achieving their goal as we make the final frantic dash along the decimated road. Trucks have been bombed out and eliminated ahead of our group and behind it with such regularity it feels like we have been not much more than gunnery practice for these boys. The gun trucks are vital and scrappy but right now their effect on the carnage is reduced to why-bother status.

  And I am even more useless than that.

  Our group has been reduced from ten vehicles to five, and by my count we have passed at least seven wrecks from the front group. It’s all driving me full-bore demented as I sit on the floor and stare up at the smoky sky, because my beautiful rifle and I are meant for a different war altogether.

  This is madness, what I am witnessing, and these guys are not giving a bit of concession to the obvious wipeout they are enduring. All three of these boys are still at it as if they have a chance to turn it around. Spent shell casings are flying back off of both gunners like a special kind of Vietnam hailstorm making a racket on the steel plating. The grenadier is spotting into the distance like a pro quarterback reading the defense and leading his wide receiver for the long bomb that’s going to rescue the game in the final seconds. Then he rockets his grenade out there into the nothingness.

  I have never felt so helpless and useless and humiliated and ashamed and spring-loaded as I do right now, trying to hold on for the last long miles ’til I can get back where I belong to fight the smart war I can fight and leave this chaotic sickness of a war to these guys who can handle it.

  Bu-hooom, bu-hoom, bu-hooom, bu-hoom!

  It is almost beyond the capacity of the senses to take in the enormity of what is happening now. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the assault gets a whole lot worse as all the enemy firepower clustered in the run up to the base has coordinated to go for Armageddon right now.

  I jump up to see what I can, and I see skies of flame ahead and behind us. There are now two cargo trucks and us in this group, and I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope that the other groups are faring any better.

  Hope falls out of the equation entirely just a few seconds later, when we all go tumbling around as the driver slams the gun truck to a halt.

  “Holy Moses,” the grenadier says as we all bunch up at the front to survey the road before us.

  The gun truck from the lead group has hit a land mine, is upturned and smoking from several places. There are human arms or legs or arms and legs trailing beside the armored box of the truck’s platform. Like the one we are standing on right now. Could be two or three guys’ limbs we’re seeing, but I don’t want to count because just the sight of them out there on their own, yards from the vehicle, is enough to make me comprehend what has happened.

  The steel sidewalls built to protect them wound up chopping them up like fish at a market stall.

  There appears to be enough space among all the wreckage that we could just about push through.

  “Drive!” one of the gunners hollers down to the cab of our truck.

&
nbsp; Nothing happens.

  “Drive, drive, already!” yells the second gunner, with the same result.

  I sling my canvas bag over my shoulder because I won’t travel ten feet from this weapon, and I scramble over the side and down to the ground. I rush to the driver’s door.

  The ex-driver’s door.

  I can’t even guess how many shots this silent partner of ours absorbed before finally giving out. There is too much blood and glass splashed all over him to count the wounds, but he sits upright, still gripping the wheel like all he needs is a quick rest and he’ll be ready to roll again.

  I throw open the door and shove the dead warrior across the seat to the shotgun side. “Sorry, man,” I say sincerely as I toss my rifle in between us and put the truck into gear.

  We tear through the demolition derby of our own smoldering trucks. I smash one of them on the way through hard enough to make it spin and skid away like a bumper car. I can hear the guys up top howling at my driving, but they’ll just have to settle for the best I can manage.

  This final stretch of road on the mountain approach to Pleiku is insanely treacherous. It seems like there is a sharp turn every twenty yards, with no margin for error on the downhill side, and I nearly tip off the edge taking the first two curves. The guys yell ever harder at me, but I just drive harder and hope they get used to us balancing on two wheels because in another minute they are going to have to go back into assault mode regardless.

  It feels wrong, infuriating and embarrassing, to be losing like this, but losing we certainly are. We have all the machinery and the armor, the firepower and personnel. The base right up there with all those resources. And still we get smacked around, because the enemy knows better.

  It’s their home field, after all, and they fight like holding on to it has more meaning than a thousand foreign armies could ever understand. They are surely right about that, as very few American GIs I’ve met have any notion at all what their own mission is about, let alone appreciating — or caring to appreciate — what the other side is thinking. I look over to my copilot, whose scalp wounds are raining a shiny blood mask over his eyes. He doesn’t want to know.

  The truth is, if anybody asked me to explain what it is we are doing here, I’d have trouble putting it into words. It’s just possible I understand Charlie’s position better than ours, because I have put myself into those slippers of his and imagined how viciously I’d go for his throat, and his buddy’s and his mother’s and his dog’s, if they came to my country looking to shoot up the place.

  There is that, and the fact that these boys all seem to know every rut and shrub and hollow of their country to a level I don’t even know my own hometown. It almost seems too easy for them at times like this, and I am raging right now to be sniping again, doing the business of bringing the maximum of death to these merciless creatures. One, by one, by one, by one, by one. The way it should be.

  If I get there. Because presently they appear to have the run of the mountain, roaming free and invisible. As I careen around the next turn, I feel the presence of Vietcong guerrillas all along the down slope to our right. And suddenly they are up in the hillside to our left, too, right under the chins of the men stationed at Pleiku.

  I overcompensate on the turn, fearing I might topple right over the edge this time. The two left wheels drop into a rut off the side of the road. The former driver comes tumbling over onto me, his forehead conking my right eyebrow in a sharp head butt. I grab his face with my right hand and I throw him with enough force to slam him into the far door. Then I just manage to yank the wheel at the correct angle to remount the road without tipping us over in the process.

  “Sorry again, pal,” I say, casting a glance at his sad self, crumpled and unappreciated and more in the foot well than on the seat. All wrong for a hero’s ending, but exactly how it looks here in real life.

  It is when I look away from him and straight ahead that it finally comes.

  The crackle-storm of small- and medium-caliber-arms fire erupts all at once, filling the air. I don’t even have the chance to react before my head snaps back and I feel the fire inside my face. A bullet has hit me smack in my right cheekbone, and the burning of the flesh quickly becomes nothing compared to the shell-shatter of bone inside.

  The light goes right out of that eye. I floor the accelerator and drive straight into the attack out of a simple lack of any other ideas. I keep the one eye open and the head as low as I dare and plow through a bullet barrage that sounds like a whole company of machine gunners is honoring us with all their attention. For their part, the guys upstairs sound like they have all bunched up at the front rail, ignoring the crossfire from up and down the mountain to pour everything they’ve got into the troops straight ahead of us.

  Thoughts of my dad flood my head as I recognize the Little Bighorn nature of the moment.

  The final unaccounted-for truck of the forward group is run off the road and banked at a forty-five-degree angle facing a boulder as big as itself. There are ten or so VC machine gunners lying flat in the grass in front of the truck and at least a couple of snipers firing at us from behind the boulder. They are wasting an awful lot of ammunition right now trying to kill the crew of this one gun truck. But they must figure it’s more than compensated for by the haul they are taking at the same time.

  Like a stream of upright, black-pajama-wearing army ants, VC fighters are running a seemingly infinite supply line from the back of that truck, that American truck, right across the road, and down the steep slope to anonymity on the other side. The truck was rigged out with ammo resupply for the base, which explains why they surgically isolated it from the pack and took it down with small arms and no bombs.

  They like to kill us and blow all our operations to oblivion.

  But they love to kill us and then take our munitions off us in the bargain.

  And kill us with our own stuff.

  The air is thick with smoke and bullets as both sides give it everything. I squint with my good eye just at steering-wheel level and stick to the road. One of our grenades explodes on the other side of the boulder and parts of at least one sniper fly up and splat down on the rock and the fighters in front of it. The gunners upstairs are rightly isolating the shooters as the thieving ants hightail it across the road, weighed down with all our gear.

  Then my grenadier turns their way as we come within about thirty yards of the scene. He rockets a grenade right at the ground, at the point where the road meets the VC escape route down the hill.

  Puwhaaam!

  The outside section of the road bursts into the air with the explosion, then several smaller explosions as the haul of ammo goes up, along with rocks and earth and probably four dead and decimated Vietcong unfortunates. Rocks and bloody pieces of dead come down on what remains of the windshield; at the same moment I slam five tons of thundering gun truck into three slow-footed foot soldiers who are barely tall enough to see me over the hood before I get them.

  The truck hardly registers the slamming of the three bodies until they are crushed underneath and some of the ordnance explodes beneath our steel-plated undercarriage. We do a small bump, a hop, a burp, really, as we barrel on over the bodies and past the firefight and make the next bend toward Pleiku.

  They were so small. Everybody knows that, I know. But there they were. So small. And then there they weren’t. With me crouching so low they probably thought they were getting run down by a haunted, driverless truck. If they got to think anything at all.

  There is a very welcome quiet when we make that turn, as the ambush seems to have been the finale of the long siege.

  I am conscious of attempting to control a lot of competing processes within myself right now. I am breathing deeply to keep from panting with the rush of adrenaline and fear and rage and defeat and the vengeance of killing enemies of any size who needed killing and invited killing. I am trying to relax, to shift out of my hyper-adrenaline state enough to maybe slow the blood that is pulsing out of
my face with the rhythm of a pump working to empty a flooded boat. I am trying to balance that impulse with the need to keep enough adrenaline going to be able to drive. The bandage on my forehead has certainly done all it can up there, so I tear it off now, and more or less stuff it into the hole of my cheek to stanch the bleeding there. I feel the bone fragments behind the stuffing shift and crunch with the pressure.

  “… have to listen! Are you listening to me?!”

  I become aware that I’m being yelled at when the voice is boosted by a crazed hammering on the roof right over my head. I lean left into what is less a window than a small rectangular earhole cut into the steel plate where a window would otherwise be.

  “What?” I yell back.

  “Stop, man. You gotta stop. Right now. We gotta go back!”

  For good or bad — and almost certainly it would have to be bad — that catches my attention and I brake hard, right there in the middle of the road.

  I pause for just a few seconds to sniff the air for trouble, but the quiet smells real. I open the door and step out onto the road.

  It’s the grenadier. He’s been hammering my roof with somebody’s helmet and now he is standing tall up there with a handgun in one hand and his rocket launcher in the other.

  “Are you alone up there?” I ask.

  “Didn’t you have a whole complete face last time I saw it?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question.”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions, then. Of course I’m alone up here. The miracle is that there’s even one of us left. How bad is that wound? Looks nasty. You gonna be all right? Can you drive?”

  The slug in my facial framework feels like, in fact, a slug. Feels like a thing that is both metal and alive, piercing and swelling as it seems to navigate its way deeper into my skull. My right eyeball feels like somebody’s got it in his fist and is squeezing it like one of those hand exercisers.