“Her name’s Thui,” he told me.
“That’s the name of a fairy princess.”
“It means water.”
I had heard rumors about my friend; soldiers talk, whispers fly through the ranks. He confirmed what I’d heard through the grapevine: he was on a difficult mission, the officer in charge of the platoon was new, they saw they were surrounded, the firing began, five were hit, and the officer ordered them to retreat without taking their wounded. The guy was a fuckup, mano, how could we leave them there? Imagine if it was you: I wouldn’t leave you to the enemy; that’s what I tried to explain to him, but the dickhead sonofabitch was crazy, mano, he drew his pistol and threatened us, and he was yelling and waving his arms, I mean, out of control. I couldn’t wait for him to calm down, there wasn’t time, so I shot him, point-blank. He went down without knowing what hit him. We got the hell out of there—with our wounded, like you should, mano. We saved all of them but one who was too far gone; they’d shot out his guts. Poor bastard, he was holding his intestines in his hands and looking at me, wild. Don’t leave me alive, Lucky Star, don’t leave me; he was beggin’. I had to shoot him in the head, may God forgive me. What a fucking mess this is, mano.
Bodies were supposed to be placed in bags, with the names neatly on tags, but there wasn’t always time for formalities—not enough time or not enough bags. You pick them up by the wrists and ankles and throw them into the helicopters, or tie them up like packages in their own ponchos, swarming with flies. In a few hours the corpses are swollen, bloated, infested with maggots, a bubbling broth of putrefaction. The helicopters are windbirds; they land in a tornado, swirling dust, garbage, and befouled clay for thirty yards around. When the dead have been lying for hours in the heat or rain, bits of flesh tear loose in the whirlwind and, if you’re standing too close, hit you in the face. On the mountain I refused to load bodies. I helped the wounded, but afterward I turned to stone and no one dared give me orders; I was beyond life and death, operating on a different plane. A crisis of nerves, a psychotic breakdown—I forget what name they gave it. They wash down the choppers with a hose, but they can’t get rid of the stench. Or the echoes of the screams; the dead aren’t really gone. I’m not crying, it’s the damned allergies or the smoke, who knows; it’s no wonder my eyes are irritated: you live breathing in filth. Every time, I give thanks I’m not one of the ones leaving in a body bag, or even worse, one of the others, the ones loaded on with their chest slit open like a piece of fruit, red stumps where legs or arms should be, but still alive, maybe for years, dogged forever by intolerable memories. Thank you, God, I’m still alive, I shouted in English there on the mountain, O Guardian Angel, dulce compañía, watch over me by night and by day, I added in Spanish, but no one heard me; between the fire of the battle and screams of the wounded, I couldn’t even hear myself. Fucking-Holy-Mother-of-God, get me out of this alive, I cried out; I had the scapulary of the Virgin of Guadalupe around my neck, a scrap of cloth stiff and black from the dried blood of Juan José. A chaplain had given it to me several weeks after my brother was killed. He was the one who had closed his eyes; he told me that Juan José was already as gray as a ghost when he took off the scapulary and asked the chaplain to give it to me for luck, to see if it would help me get out alive. What were his last words? was all I could think to ask the chaplain. Hold me, Padre, I’m falling. Hold me, it’s so dark down there, was the last thing you said, mano, and I wasn’t there to hear you or hold you tight and yank you back from death. Oh, shit. Oh, bloody shit! What good was the damn scapulary, mano! You lose your faith here, but you get superstitious and begin to see fatal omens everywhere: Tuesdays are bad luck, it’s been exactly a week since something happened, it’s the calm before the storm, the planes always go down in threes, and two were shot down today. . . . You’ll live to be an old man, Greg, Olga swore to me, you’ll have time to make a lot of mistakes, to be sorry for some and suffer like hell; it won’t be an easy life, but I guarantee it’ll be a long one, it’s written here on your palm and in the tarot cards. But she could have made it up, she doesn’t know anything, she’s a worse fake than my father, worse than all the people who tell fortunes and sell amulets in this whole godforsaken country. She told Juan José Morales the same thing, and he believed it; what a stupid bastard you were, mano. You were sure of your good luck, that’s why you weren’t more careful; your confidence was so contagious that two guys from your squad did everything they could to stick close to you: they were sure they’d be safe there. Now none of you can go to Olga and get your money back.
The jungle is filled with sounds, animal cries, padding paws, swishing noises, murmurs, but not the forest; the forest is silent, an opaque silence. I imagine that from the air it looks purified by the fire, and clean, but on the ground it’s hell. You get used to it after a while; the worst perversion, the most obscene part of war, is that it can seem normal. At first I was confused, then euphoric; in both cases my conscience was dormant. Now, in the village, I’m beginning to think again. There’s no reason to think in a firefight; you become a noise- and death-dealing machine. No one wants a thinking man, a critic with a conscience, only machos bursting with testosterone—illiterate blacks, Latin bandits, criminals released from prisons to serve: guys like me are dead weight. After each patrol, my muscles twitch, I can’t control my hands, my teeth are clenched, and a tic pulses in my face. It’s like a demented smile; many of the men have it. It goes away, they say. In the months I’ve been here I’ve become accustomed to being wet to the bone, to feet rubbed raw inside my boots, to fingers frozen around my weapon, to being ringed by shadows, waiting for the shot that will come at any instant from anywhere, to counting the steps between me and that bush, the minutes to reach the river, the hours to end this patrol, the days to complete my hitch and go home. Counting the seconds of life and computing the odds that the next burst of machine gun fire will kill my buddy, not me. And asking myself what the shit I’m doing here, not wanting to admit, not even in the depths of my soul, the strange fascination of violence, the vertigo of war. That dawn on the mountain when it began to grow light, I saw that only nine of us were still alive; the dead and wounded were too many to count. We had fought through the night. With daylight the bombers came and strafed the mountainside, forcing the guerrillas to retreat, and then the helicopters landed. The sound of the engines was music to my ears, the sound of my mother’s heartbeat before I was born, tic-tac tic-tac . . . life. Let us pray, says the Methodist chaplain, and the others sing A mighty fortress is our God while I sing O, Susanna. Confess, my son, says the Catholic chaplain, and I tell him to go confess to his whorish mother, but then I repent: I’d just as soon not be struck by a bolt of lightning, as Padre Larraguibel used to say, and be taken out in mortal sin. Do not fear, for God is with you. In the Sunday sermon they read the story of Job. Worn down by the trials the Lord has visited upon him, Job says, “For the thing which I greatly fear is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.” Don’t think bad things, mano, because they’ll happen. Don’t call up devil death by thinking about him, Juan José Morales used to warn me, laughing. Lucky Star they called Juan José. Lucky Star Morales.
There’s the smoke too. My mind is in a fog. Smoke from tobacco, pot, hashish, whatever crud I’m smoking, the mist of cold mornings in the mountains and steaming heat of valleys at noon, dust and diesel fumes, fetid clouds from napalm, phosphorus, and more bombs than I can count, and the burning that knows no beginning or end and is turning this country into a desert crisscrossed by black scars. All kinds of smoke, smoke of all colors. From above they must look like clouds, and sometimes they are: down here the smoke is part of the terror. We can’t stop, even for an instant, no one can; if we keep moving we have the illusion we’re outwitting death, we scurry like poisoned rats. In contrast, the enemy stays quiet, no wasted anxiety; they wait silently, they have generations of training for pain be
hind them—who can decipher the immutable expression on those faces? Those bastards don’t feel anything, a marine told me who specialized in getting information from prisoners; they’re like laboratory frogs. We keep on the move in our frenzy to stay alive—and then on the way to where we’re going meet death face-to-face. The enemy crawl silently through their tunnels, blend into the foliage, melt away in a breath, and they can see in the dark. We are never safe. Figure it out, Juan José Morales said, count how many men have come to this stinkhole, and then count the casualties. The percentage is really low, mano, we’re going to get out in one piece, don’t you worry. I suppose that he was right and that most of us will live to tell about it, but here all we think about is the dead and the atrocities told by survivors. Yes, many come out looking normal, but no one is ever the same, we’re marked forever; but who cares? We’re garbage anyway. This is a war fought by blacks and poor whites, country boys, boys from small towns, from the worst barrios; the sons of the wealthy don’t end up as common grunts: their fathers find ways to keep them at home or their colonel uncles assign them safe duty. My mother argues that racism is the worst perversion; Cyrus always said it is class injustice. They’re both right, I guess; we’re not even equal when we go to war. No Dogs or Mexicans Allowed you’d see on some restaurants not long ago. And Whites Only painted on public rest rooms. Here, on the other hand, men of color are welcome, very welcome, but racial tension burns beneath the superficial camaraderie: whites hang out with whites, blacks with blacks, Latinos with Latinos, Asians with Asians, all with their own language, music, rites, superstitions. In the camps the barrios have inviolable boundaries; I wouldn’t dare walk into black territory without being invited. It’s no different from where I grew up; nothing’s changed. Every man has his story, but I don’t want to hear it; I don’t want friends either, I can’t give myself the luxury of becoming fond of someone and then seeing him die, like Juan José, or that poor kid from Kansas up on the mountain; all I want is to do my job, do my tour, and get out alive. I pray for a wound serious enough to send me home but not serious enough to cripple me. One helicopter pilot I know, a cheerful mulatto from Alabama, used to say, if only they don’t get me in the balls; he went home covered with medals but in a wheelchair. That will never happen to me, that business of the medals, I told myself, and then they gave me one because I went crazy. I’m a war hero, I have a fucking Silver Star. I never meant to do anything more than my duty; I’ve always said that it’s better to live like a coward than die like a fool, but by one of life’s ridiculous ironies now I’m Mr. Shitass Hero. First lesson of the barrio: There’s no virtue in heroism, only in survival. Oh, Juan José, why didn’t you pay attention to what you taught me yourself when we were a couple of snotty-nosed kids? And now how am I going to explain to your parents and your brothers and sisters? how the hell can I look Carmen and your mother in the face? how can I tell them the truth? I’ll have to lie to them, hermano, and keep on lying, because I don’t have the courage to tell them they blew away half your body and that those decorations you won for bravery—I’m sure they sent them to your mother to hang on the living room wall—are nothing but painted tin stars that don’t mean much at the time you’re dying.
I know violence: it’s a crazed beast. You can’t reason with it; you have to try to outwit it. I envy the pilots; up there you cash it in with more elegance; you drop like a stone or explode in a million pieces, with no time even to pray, like Martínez when the train hit him—pachuco bastard, I don’t even hate him anymore. But down here on the ground in the infantry they can get you a thousand ways: spitted on the sharpened stakes of a leaf-covered pit, decapitated by machete, blown up by a grenade or a mine, cut in half by machine gun fire, torched to a crisp—and that’s not even counting the ingenious deaths that come with being taken prisoner. Dig a hole in the ground and hide until this is all over; crawl into some animal’s den, as Oliver and I used to when I was a boy. Why wasn’t it my luck to pull an office job? Lots of guys are sitting out the war under a ceiling fan; if I’d been more clever I wouldn’t be here, I would have done my service when I got out of high school, for example, instead of slaving like a peon at a time when no one was even talking about the war. And now I’m here, stupid fool that I am, too old to be in a hell like this; I feel like a grandfather to these baby-faced kids in camouflage uniforms. I don’t want my bones to end up under a cross in a military cemetery, one among thousands; I want to die an old man in Carmen’s arms. Jesus, I hadn’t thought about Carmen in a long time. Why did I say Carmen and not Samantha? Where did that flash come from? In her last letter she told me about a new boyfriend; Chinese or Japanese, I think she said, but she didn’t give his name. I wonder who it is this time? She has a real talent for choosing the worst possible men for herself; this one’s probably some ragged, long-haired lotus-eater; they have them in Europe too, by the gross. The last snapshot she sent showed her standing in front of the cathedral in Barcelona, dressed like a flamenco dancer or some such thing. I’m no puritan, but I thought of Pedro Morales and I wrote her and told her she was too old to act like a teenager, that she should take off that junk and put on a bra: Oh, well, what do I care, it’s your business, go ahead and screw things up. Carmen . . . how I wish I could hear your voice, Carmen.
I’m afraid I’ve completely crossed over the line, lost any sense of good and bad, of what’s decent. I’m so used to atrocity that I can’t imagine life without it. I try to remember what friends do to have a good time, how you share breakfast with your family, what you say to a woman on your first date, but all that has evaporated, and I doubt if it will ever come back. The past is a swirl of hazy fragments: the dance contests with Carmen, my mother listening to the opera in her wicker chair, the duel with Martínez that made me the asshole hero of the school—my God, the crazy things you do at that age; no girl could refuse me, and when I bought the Buick they begged me. I was as poor as a church mouse, but I bought that wreck of a car; when I was at the wheel I felt like a sheik, and in the back seat I sinned more than I care to remember. We didn’t, as the girls said, go all the way, of course; the boy attacked and the girl defended herself—not very enthusiastically, but she couldn’t cooperate in her own seduction even if she was dying to; hot necking was what we did, more like a cat fight than lovemaking, a wrestling match that left us both limp—come outside her, God, don’t get her pregnant, if you go to bed with her you’ll have to marry her, you’re a gentleman, aren’t you? Only Ernestina Pereda did it with everyone, God bless Ernestina Pereda, I hope you’re well and happy, Saint Ernestina, you were wild for it, but afterward you’d cry, and you’d make us swear we’d keep the secret, a secret trumpeted from the housetops, everyone knew about you and took advantage of your passion and your generosity, if it hadn’t been for Olga and you, my blood would have turned to poison from all my obsessions. Here women are like tiny, preadolescent girls, nothing but a handful of bones; they don’t have breasts or hair anywhere on their bodies, and they’re always sad; you feel more pity for them than desire. Only one thing about them is lavish, their hair, their long smooth black hair sparked with blue lights. I took one young girl to bed in a room filled with people; her family was eating in one corner, and a baby was crying in a quartermaster’s supply box. We were in the bed, separated from the others by a threadbare curtain; she was reciting a string of obscenities in English that she’d learned by heart. I’m sure there’s a manual for dirty phrases; the War Office thinks of everything; if there are manuals for how to use the latrines, why wouldn’t there be one for training prostitutes? We want the best for our boys, no matter what, the cream of the nation, right? Shut up, I begged her, but she didn’t understand or didn’t want to be quiet, and her family was talking on the other side of the curtain and the baby kept crying. Suddenly I remembered something I’d seen in a dusty southern town when I was five years old: two men raping a young Negro girl, two giants crushing a terrified little girl between them, a girl as small and fragile as the one I was
with, and I felt like one of them, huge and satanic, and my desire flowed from me, and my erection with it. I don’t know why at just that moment I remembered something that happened more than twenty years before on the other side of the world. Leo Galupi, that engaging scoundrel, took me to see the Granny, a local curiosity, a wrinkled old woman who crawls around beneath the tables in the bar, peddling her services; she’s a wizard, they say, and once she’s had you in the clutches of those monkey mandibles, you get real choosy. She asks ten dollars, and you don’t have to worry about anything; she takes charge, she even cleans you up afterward and zips your fly for you. She makes the rounds, busily entertaining her clients under the table, while everyone else keeps drinking and playing cards and telling dirty jokes. I couldn’t do it; I don’t know whether it was repugnance or pity. The Granny’s hair is almost white; she’s a not at all venerable old lady, with the biceps of Charles Atlas and a few razor-sharp teeth; one time she’ll do what we all fear: rip off someone’s prick with one fierce, tearing motion. That risk is part of the game; each client fears that she will decide to do it just when his turn comes, and . . . zap!