by Mike Bond
“How many times,” he looked at me, “you go into combat? When a fight was coming and you knew it?”
I tried to count them. Didn’t want to. “What you getting at?”
“Remember how your gut burns? You catch yourself not breathing? You notice the skin on the back of your hand and wonder if soon you’ll never see it or think again, that hand will never move again – you know all that shit –”
“So?”
“I never told you the night that changed my life. Now I’m gonna die so I’m gonna tell you.” He grimaced from the pain, trying to hide it. “Phoenix.”
“I always figured you did that. You never said.”
“It’s not what anybody wants to talk about. Not then, not now.”
If you don’t know about the Phoenix Program just Google it. Patterned on Nazi tactics used against French Resistance networks in WWII, Phoenix was run by the CIA, Seals, and Special Forces. The idea was to use torture and widespread murder to intimidate villages from backing the Viet Cong. In the Phoenix program over fifty thousand people, mostly civilians, were tortured to death or otherwise killed between ‘65 and ’72, many shot discriminately, and another thirty thousand beaten, jailed and broken.
It was revelation of their participation in this program that later caused several presidential candidates such as Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey to drop out of contention.
“We went up the Mekong into Cambodia one night,” Pa said. “Of course we weren’t supposed to be there. So we had rubber sandals, dark plain clothes, AKs, no dog tags, nothing that could be American… A local guy was going to lead us to the hut of a Viet Cong major, some liaison with the Cambodians. The idea was cut his throat, a few others, get out silently – sowing terror – the whole Phoenix deal.
“We took Swifts then transferred to two dugouts with electric motors. The local guy’s name was Rith, I remember. Means strong in Cambodian, something like that. He spoke Vietnamese too, so I translated for us. After two hours the river narrowed and there were islands in the middle. Bao dai dai, Rith whispered. Go slow.
“We pulled ashore and Rith led us up the bank along a trail beside a little paddy that was black and glittering with stars… I remember thinking how lovely it was. The village appeared out of the darkness, a dozen huts with tall thatched roofs, the smell of smoke, shit and rotten fruit, you know the deal. And here and there a glimmer of coals through an open door…
“Rith grabbed my shoulder, pointed to the huts, ticking them off, mai, quon, sey. Third one from the left. Two of our guys split right and left to provide cover for anything outside the third hut. My buddy Mack and I took a path across the paddy toward the huts.
“We reached the third hut and knelt on either side of the open door. You could smell inside, the green boughs laid on coals to keep away mosquitoes. I pulled out my KA-BAR – it sounded so loud, sliding from the sheath. I went into the hut and Mack slipped in behind me.
“In the light of the coals I saw the glisten of a rifle alongside this slender guy… Rith had said he was small and slender, the VC major. It took me like five minutes, you know, to reach him, on all fours, knife in my teeth.
“When I reached him I grabbed the knife and yanked up his chin, cupping his mouth like we were supposed to, you know, to get a clean cut, and his eyes opened and I realized his hair was long and silky…”
“Jesus, Pa –”
Out beyond the taro fields a donkey was braying, and Pa listened for a moment, as if it were decipherable, some universal truth. “It was a teenage girl. I guess she must’ve been crippled, or something – what I’d thought was a rifle was a crutch. I looked around in there – there wasn’t any VC major, just this girl, an old mama-san, a couple kids, an ancient white-haired man…”
A mosquito landed on his forearm and Pa waved it away. “Maybe it was forever, that I stared into her eyes and she into mine. You could say anything about her look – pleading, terrified, startled… but at the end she knew, as I did, there was no choice. I’d made a mistake; we’d made a mistake. But if I let her live she could wake the village and we’d never get out. I was responsible for the rest of the team…”
“Jesus.”
He nodded, facing the darkness, swallowed, then, “That was when my head went upside down. Even more than Tet.”
By that he meant the woman he’d loved who’d been blown to bits by thousand-pounders. “It was good I got wounded soon after Tet,” he added, “or I’d have gone mad.”
The wound was a bullet that smashed his femur and got him choppered out of a forward LP before it was overrun, and had put him three months in the hospital and left him with a limp and pain he never spoke about. And that instant I realized that one of the reasons I’d ended up in Special Forces was to avenge his wound, to make him whole again.
“I was the only one of us survived that war,” Pa said. “Mack got it the same firefight I was wounded in. The other two went upriver one night and never came back.”
He turned on me. “And this is why I never married again after your Mom died. Why I would never again fall for anyone. I’d learned that every woman I loved would die to fill the soul of that crippled girl.”
I felt sickened, went outside, came back in. “The Koran says that all the good we do is from God, not from us. And all the evil we do comes from us.”
“God can’t have it both ways.”
There was nothing I could do to shrive Pa of his sins. We are all, I realized, stuck with our sins. We can atone for them but can never be absolved. Nor should we.
“I’d love to go with you, Pa. Sail out in another canoe, keep you company all the way.” Saying it I realized how shamefully foolish it was – what was I going to do when he fell out of the canoe, drag him back in? Pull him up when for the last time he went under?
Fight off the sharks?
PA’s face had grown more haggard and pale; it was not just the awfulness of the memories and the progress of pain and death, even more it seemed a recognition of humanity’s fate, the earth’s, all life’s.
“An incomprehensible mystery, life,” he said. “When I was younger I expected to understand it better when I got old. But I don’t… In some ways I understood it better then.”
He leaned forward, punched his palm. “When you’re young you have sex, life, danger, exaltation, nature, the ocean – maybe that’s understanding life.”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I said, “to live through all this and not understand, that it’s a dream –”
“– and in the end,” Pa chuckled, “it kills us.”
Rascal the cat leaped up on the table and flopped down beside Pa, one foreleg over Pa’s wrist. “We’ve been together fourteen years.” Pa rubbed the big cat behind the ears. “He knows I’m going. Knew it before I did.”
“I wish I could take him –”
“Old Ambrosio wants him.” Ambrosio was a Filipino taro farmer and fisherman, Pa’s upstream neighbor. “He’s got mice.” He scratched under Rascal’s chin. “We don’t have mice here, do we, Rascal?”
For an instant I imagined this house after Pa and Rascal were gone, the mice, centipedes and scorpions taking over, the place falling apart, eaten by jungle.
“The tragedy of getting old,” Pa added, “Winston Churchill said, is not that you’re old, but that you’re still young.”
LOVE AND WAR. I sat out on Pa’s front patio in the sifting darkness of the palm trees, the high buttresses of the valley walls cutting off the lower sky. Westward, above the rims, gleamed Venus, below her the bloody glint of Mars.
Love and War, our two choices. And we keep choosing both.
NEXT DAY when I hiked back down the King’s Path two black dogs were playing on the beach where the river meets the sea. They ran in circles spattering sand, in and out of the foam. They were playing with some kind of a cork buoy, little bigger than a tennis ball. I had a fleeting sense of their joy – joy is what God loves most – and I wondered can we maximize the world’s joy and minimize its p
ain – or is all our joy built on others’ pain – the lamb at the feast, the mouse in the cat’s jaws?
WIA
HE HAD NO ARMS beyond the elbow, stainless steel struts below the knees. No chin, just a mouth that ended with the upper jaw. He was taking his Big Mac from the paper bag when I saw him at the Atlanta departure gate for Portland, using his cut-off elbows to hold it, remove the paper, and bring it to his mouth.
Everyone seemed to be avoiding him so I went over and sat. He glanced at me, nodded, went back to eating. Outside was a glaring cold day, snowy clouds scurrying across the tarmac. On the TV screens clamped to every location and angle in the room was an advertisement for hair spray then for huge pickup trucks, another for cash loans, then an emergency weather report that it might rain in Iowa or, very importantly, there could be a storm in the ocean somewhere off Bangladesh.
Then comes a special report on terrorism and who is being quoted, his mousy little moustache quivering with self-importance, but Maine’s own Artie Lemon, a recently minted member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, and he’s giving us the lowdown on ISIS.
From which I deduced that “Senate Intelligence”, like we used to say in SF about “military intelligence”, is definitely an oxymoron.
When the armless, legless vet was done with his Big Mac he balled up the wrapper and bag and took them to the paper recycling bin. With his steel legs set in shiny new Adidas he had a jaunty bowlegged walk.
The TVs shifted to a another show called “The Talk”. This consisted of a number of heavily made-up women, half of them extremely obese, one who’d had so many plastic surgeries she looked like a Martian, all in a half-circle round a table talking endlessly with great TV energy about absolutely nothing.
The vet rearranged his backpack, took out a boarding pass and went to the counter. He had the high squeaky voice of someone whose voice box has been shattered and whose lower jaw is gone. He asked the clerk if he could get a window seat. When the clerk said they were all gone, he nodded okay and came back.
“Here’s mine.” I handed him my boarding pass.
“Nah,” he said. “I’m good.”
“I don’t like the window anyway. Afraid of heights.”
He looked at me with untroubled brown eyes. A small guy, maybe five-eight. The kind the Marines and Special Forces love because they’re so gritty and strong. “Headed home?” I said.
“Gonna stay with my sister in Rumford for a while.”
This meant that after being brought back from shattering death and then two years of agonized days and nights, repeated surgeries, battles with infections, hopelessness, insanely mindfucking drugs, sorrow and all the aftermaths of IED annihilation, the numb painkillers, the memories of dead buddies, the knowledge that the rest of his life would be this lonely painful path with no lovers and no children, they had now set him out to try to make it on his own, in the bosom of whatever family he could find.
“Iraq?” I said.
He tried to grin. “Mosul.”
“I did a tour there, and two in Afghanistan.”
He nodded. “I did Afghanistan first.”
“You had all your fun early.”
We laughed slightly, in that strange mode you get in with other vets where you try to make light of dangers and losses. Usually it doesn’t work but you try.
“At least,” I said, “we don’t have GW any more being landed on that aircraft carrier proclaiming victory.”
“We get sent down the wrong path, “ he said, to himself more than me. “It’s only afterwards we understand. When it’s too late.”
“That’s what my Pa said about being a Seal. You were in the middle of it before you knew what atrocious things you were going to have to do.”
People were boarding. He stood, slung on his backpack. “Thanks for the seat.”
We walked down the ramp. “If I’d been in the next seat in that Humvee,” he said, “I wouldn’t even be here now.”
It occurred to me sadly that for most of life he was not and could not be here now. I wondered at his courage, and doubted I could match it.
Courage, I got thinking as the endless sprawl of half-despoiled America unrolled below us, courage is not just bravery under fire – although that horrifying event often brings out incomprehensible valor in young men. But the truest, more profound courage is in the shattered semi-survivors of IEDs, grenades, RPGs and all the other engines of human diabolicism, engines which did not even rival the horrifying destructiveness of the weapons used by our own side.
These young men, some without arms and legs, with half a face, no genitals, no future, and no hope – these were the most courageous – to go forward every day, see other healthy young men with young women, others building lives that these guys could never have, and keep the will to survive despite all this – these were our greatest heroes. To be cut off from every promise and act of life, but to be alive to realize you would never have even a shred of it, like the quadriplegic survivor of an IED doomed to lie on a bed the rest of his life, all because GW Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hillary Clinton, Biden and a lot of other folks who had never seen war wanted to prove how brave they were.
As if sending young men out to be eviscerated, to cause the deaths of a over a million people, all for no reason, were an act of courage rather than a cowardly and criminal lie.
ON THE WAY TO LEXIE’S I again checked Abigail’s house. It looked even more abandoned than before – snowdrifts across the driveway, icicles on the gutters, old footprints frozen in the snow. The pile of mail inside the door had grown, but I could still see the corner of the envelope that said READ THIS NOW in red magic marker.
It still made no sense the cops hadn’t looked through the mail. They seemed totally disinterested in her disappearance.
It was almost as if they knew where she was. Or what had happened to her.
I walked back down the slippery sidewalk and scanned the house for the best way in. Lots of big windows, old glass that’s easy to tape and break.
Tonight.
FIVE MINUTES after I got to Lexie’s her land line rings. “Yeah?” she answers, hand on her hip. “He’s here.” She gives me the phone, blocking the receiver with her palm. “Viv Woodridge, lives down the road.”
“Mr. Hawkins,” the woman says, formal-like. “I’m sure Lexie’s told you about me and Don? We’re the ones leaving town, next week –”
“I’ve heard. I’m sorry.”
“You’re the one who helped stop the wind project in Hawaii, Jane says.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s something we’d like to talk to you about, before we leave.”
“Go ahead –”
“No, no, I mean in person. Can you come over tonight? It’s rather important.”
“I just got back, let me check with Lexie if I have to be someplace.” I wanted to break into Abigail’s tonight and gave Lexie a pleading look: Please think of something!
But she must have been pissed at me for some reason because she said clear and loud,” No, Sam, you’re free all evening!”
“Come for dinner, then,” Viv said. “Six o’clock? And tell Lexie come too, she wants.”
“No way I’m going over there,” Lexie says when I hang up.
“Why’s that?”
“They were the ones who first took WindPower money. Sold out, and now they can’t live there because of the noise, and they can’t sell.”
“How much they get paid?”
“Everyone who takes money from WindPower has to sign a gag order. But from what I hear it’s about eight thousand.”
“Eight thousand?” It was astounding to lose your home for so little. “What happens if they do talk?”
“Jail time plus they get sued in civil court and lose whatever they’ve got left.”
My head pounded with intercontinental fatigue and the grind of the turbines up on the ridge. “I don’t know why I said yes, really don’t want to…” I slid into a chair thinking of the sim
ilar scam that had almost destroyed Molokai, Hawaii’s most beautiful island, before a bunch of brave people stopped it. And of what was now happening to Maine. And because of the Maine Wind Law no one could stop it. Straight out of the Supreme Soviet, 1932.
In the former Soviet Union the commissars in Moscow would decide to build a dam somewhere, payback for some other crooked favor done elsewhere. So five thousand miles from Moscow some magnificent region of verdant valleys, rushing streams, flowered hills and ancient homes would be flooded to fill a concrete monstrosity, allegedly to send electricity to Moscow.
And by the time that power got there it wouldn’t fry an egg.
But think of all the money made along the way. It made you sick: What we humans are versus what we could be.
THE NIGHT WAS CLEAR AND SHARP when I left Lexie’s in Bucky’s 150 headed for Don and Viv’s. They were in their sixties, Lexie’d said. Viv had been a public health service nurse in one of those backwoods Maine towns where everybody takes good care of everybody because there’s nine months of winter and nobody has any money. And because as kids they used to take refuge in each other’s homes when their own folks were upset just because they’d set an empty shack on fire or painted the back of somebody’s garage purple or something else innocent as that.
And while Viv was taking care of people who worked ten tough hours a day and had nasty injuries and no health care, Don was working in the woods at thirty-five below in winter, ducking the widow-makers and tumbling logs, watching Maine’s forest disappear.
Except for the gnashing wail of windmills on the ridge above it, theirs was a lovely home – the woodstove throwing off its beneficent heat, hooked rugs on the broad spruce floors, a friendly kitchen with a white porcelain sink, chuckling refrigerator and a pine table and chairs. And with a glass of home brew and three bowls of venison stew in my stomach, seeing the two of them with their calm kindly recognition of each other that masked a connection so deep you could hang your clothes on it, it reminded me of Pa and Ma before we lost her to a drunken driver in the wrong lane on a Sunday night.
