Come back, bullet. Come back.
Hell no. I can’t come.
After shooting the guy and wishing he hadn’t, Al runs up and turns him over, or what’s left of him. What astounds Al is the way the third round, the only one that hit the guy, has nearly torn him in half. His top half is lying facedown; his bottom half, his hips, are facing upward. As he studies the man, he sees that he’s young, in his twenties, near his age. He’s standing there and an old woman comes charging out of a nearby hooch and she’s screaming. The old woman’s saying something to Al, and Al says, “Van, what’s she saying?”
Van, the interpreter, translates: “She’s saying that he’s a mute. A deaf-mute. He can’t hear.”
Al about collapses on the ground, all kinds of thoughts running through his head: “I came here to protect children and people, not to kill them.” He wonders how he can repay the man’s family for his mistake and knows just as quickly that no repayment is possible. He already feels that he’ll barely be able to live with himself. This moment perhaps answers all kinds of questions for Al about how he will live the rest of his life. He will grow into old age as a genuinely sensitive man and accept Jesus as a savior. He will believe in UFOs and end times/Armageddon, and spend quiet, air-conditioned hours in his California home Googling the existence of either. As a loving father, he will spend time with his son playing video games, namely aerial combat, and he will marry a loving woman whose health will require his constant attention as her in-home caretaker.
And then there is something else that happens to Al, if he had any doubts about the meaning of his presence in Hai Lang. One night out on ambush, Al spots a dog in a graveyard walking around looking lost, and the guys in the platoon start to shoot at the dog, trying to hit it. They don’t want to kill it; they want to hit it just to see if they can. They don’t realize that hitting the dog will likely kill it. Their sense of cause and effect is warped. Al loves animals, especially dogs, and he’s seething that any of them are shooting to begin with. To put an end to this, he raises his M-60 and fires off a round to scare the dog away. But at the last moment, the dog changes direction and walks right into the bullet and drops dead. Al wants to scream. But he swallows his scream, which travels somewhere deep inside him, just as Stan’s own image of his dead mother has gone up into the moist attic of his head, jostling around up there under his heavy steel helmet—Mom, up there, and Al’s scream about the dog up there too, baking under their helmets.
After shooting the dog, Al doesn’t understand his place in the world. When he pulls a trigger, he sometimes worries that something else will go wrong. Growing up in Honolulu, his friends had been Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino; he feels simpatico with Vietnamese people by extension of these friendships, and an important part of him feels that he’s in Vietnam to save the Vietnamese people from . . . communism? Well, yes, but more immediately from danger itself: gunfire, bombings, from whomever might want to do the Vietnamese people harm. Al knows he will keep killing as long as he’s in Vietnam, and he’ll kill to keep his buddies alive. When he’s tired, they carry his ammunition belts for him; when they’re fighting, he covers them with the heavy fire he lays down with the machine gun. The men call him “Dova”—Doe-Vuh—as in, “Dova, how’s your ammo?” They don’t ever want him to run out. He can shoot from his hip and lob rounds into groupings of enemy soldiers.
At times, thinking of his father—an Irishman who’d drifted from the mainland United States to Honolulu and married his mother, a Hawaiian—fills him with anger. At age nineteen, he’s over six feet tall, pure muscle, dark hair, dark brooding eyes, long arms—a street fighter. With each firefight, he’s scared, but he’s afraid to admit this to the platoon. He thinks that if the other guys only knew how much time he spends being scared, they’d think less of him. At the same time, he thinks he got exactly what he wanted when he joined the Army. He got adventure. He’s grown up feeling ashamed of his father for failing to see combat in World War II. His dad was a baker in the Navy and never saw a day of death. Al lied to his boyhood friends, saying, “Hell, my dad flew fighter planes against the Japanese,” in order to keep up with their stories about their dads.
Later, after leaving the war, hoping for some reconciliatory moment with his father, Al will take a pistol off a dead NVA soldier he’d just killed. He will clean it and carefully store it among his things, waiting for the day when he can return home, thinking that he will present it to his father and they will talk. Or at least, they won’t fight and punch each other. When that day came, he did give his father the pistol. And one day his father will take this same pistol, walk around to the back of the house, and blow his brains out with it.
• • •
Paul Sudano, a medic, is walking when he sees an arm in the shape of an L lying on the ground, sticking out of a hole. It’s just the arm, disembodied but connected to a body because . . . it moves. The hand opens and grabs a rifle that’s lying nearby, the fingers flex open and close around the wood stock, and the hand slowly pulls the rifle into the hole. Sudano and radioman Tom Soals walk up to the hole and yell, “Okay, come on out!” And they’re wondering, of course, if the soldier’s going to shoot, spraying them at knee level with gunfire.
But no.
Silence.
“We said come on out!”
They’re speaking through their South Vietnamese translator.
They’re tired, but mostly they’re losing their minds. They are so tired that they can’t even remember sleep.
One of their platoon-mates walks up and throws a grenade in the hole. It explodes and the hole collapses. Sudano thinks, That’s the end of that guy, right?
He gets ready to leave; no need to investigate further. “What a mess in there, right?” And then they hear some voices coming from the collapsed hole, and they start digging and digging. They find an arm, a hand, and a bloody braid of long gray hair. They start pulling the body parts free from the tight grip of the hole and uncover two old women, horribly damaged. Their brains are falling out of their heads. And they find the soldier too, who’d been hiding in the hole and precipitated the grenading.
He’s fine, of course, and isn’t that the sonofabitch of it all: for the soldier to be fine? Sudano knows this is a fight between him and the soldier and that these women have nothing to do with it. The women are in bad shape; they’re convulsing and won’t make it. A soldier walks up and says to Sudano, “Anything you can do for them, doc?”
“No, not really,” he says. “I haven’t been resupplied. I don’t have enough as it is.”
He does the math: if he spends field supplies on these wounded Vietnamese civilians, he may not have enough supplies to treat wounded Recon members. He makes a decision: he can’t treat the women. They may die, but he doesn’t know what else to do.
They call a medevac and it lands and takes them away and god knows if they’ll make it. As he’s standing by the LZ as the chopper lifts, Sudano is already haunted by this moment, as if it’s lived inside him for years.
• • •
Back at LZ Jane some nights, they sing. They look up at the dusk sky, light a cigarette, somebody bitches about his girlfriend, the letter she wrote, the one that says “I’m leaving you for William,” and forever after, a name like William or Daniel, a name that just seems so much fancier than any of the names they have, names like the Rock or Kickass or Short-Timer, those fancy names of guys who are laying their girlfriends back in the States, making them moan, nobody says those names. It’s terrible to wait for sleep and think of their girls getting laid by other men. And there they are, stuck, frozen, in a place where every day seems the same, and where each hour might be their last.
They change the words to the songs they sing.
They change “Kansas City” as sung by Little Richard to:
Going to Vietnam, Vietnam here I come.
They’ve got some crazy little people here.
And I’m going to kill me some.
Amid the stea
dy rain, the trees seethe with leeches. Stan wakes one morning with one stuck to his eyelid. It has grown enormous, thick as a hammer handle.
At first he thinks he’s gone blind. He reaches up and touches it and says, “I can’t see!”
That’s when the firefight erupts. First the mortars, then the small arms. They are under attack. The platoon begins returning fire. Stan is pulling hard on the leech, stretching his eyelid far out from his eyeball, screaming that he must get it off so he can see. At the same time, with his left hand, he’s firing his M-16 into a tree line.
Finally, the leech breaks free and disgorges its night’s meal. Stan’s buddies look over and think he’s been shot in the face—he is covered in blood. He tries wiping it away, but there is so much of it. All the while, though, he is still firing his rifle. And then, as quick as the battle started, it ends. Nobody has been hit.
• • •
On February 18, in the morning, Jerry Austin gets another kill. He is walking along the dirt road toward the village of Trung Hoa and up ahead spots a VC soldier walking toward him. Reports are that a large number of enemy soldiers have amassed near the village.
Jerry can see that the guy has a 1918 Browning automatic rifle (BAR) over his shoulder, and Jerry guesses he’s VC because he’s not dressed in NVA khaki. The man sees Jerry watching him and hightails up the road to a small hooch. He goes around it and slips down into a hole in the ground next to it. Jerry doesn’t see any of this happen, of course; by the time he runs up to the hooch and dips around the back, the man’s in the hole. A sergeant comes up behind Austin, and they’re standing there, thinking, What next? The sergeant decides, “Okay, so throw a grenade in there,” and that’s when a grenade comes pitching up out of the hole, aimed at both of them. The bastard’s trying to hit them! Austin can’t believe what happens next: the stupid grenade hits the sloped dirt apron around the hole, lands there, and then begins to roll back into the hole. It drops in like a long putt on a golf course and explodes. Luckily for the guy in the hole, he’d thrown a concussion grenade meant to stun instead of shred and kill.
“Go get him,” says the sergeant, and Austin walks over there and stands quiet and listens, tilting his head the way you would over the blowhole of a whale. He can smell the earth scorched by the explosion and hears the faintest groaning from inside the hole, an “oh, oh, oh.” Jerry reluctantly reaches down and is surprised to find the guy’s feet; he somehow turned around after throwing the grenade, probably to get his head away from the blast. Jerry pulls on the boot and the guy emerges, as if being born backward. He’s all blown up: his ears are bleeding, his eyes are bleeding, he’s covered in dust, and he’s barely conscious. He’s dying quickly. The sergeant looks him over and looks for anything that might be of souvenir value. He sees the belt. “Get me that belt,” he says.
“I was thinking I’d like the belt,” Jerry says.
“I outrank you, I get the belt.”
Austin reaches and unfastens the buckle. He pulls the leather through the loops, and the man’s hips lift at the last pull and fall back. The belt dangles free, long as a snake, and Austin hands it to the sergeant. “Thank you,” he says. “Now kill him.”
Austin looks at him. He’s never killed anybody up close before, and the sergeant says again, “Now kill him,” and Austin lifts his rifle and shoots him in the chest and he’s dead. He reaches down and grabs the soldier’s BAR, an American rifle prized for its reliability and ease of use. Jerry thinks it sure is nice to have this new rifle. He thinks it sure is weird to kill a guy like that, so up-close and personal.
• • •
About twenty minutes later, Stan and Wongus are walking a trail at the edge of Trung Hoa. They’ve been on ambush a few nights in a row, and it feels kind of good to be doing this, walking along, when somebody starts shooting at them. The bullets snap by, sounding like the crack of a leather belt near your ear, just like that. That’s the sound of the projectile breaking the sound barrier. Two Viet Cong soldiers jump up from the weeds by the side of the trail and start running away. Stan and Wongus shoot at both of them. One dies quickly, falling dead in midstride; the other keeps running, maybe a dozen steps, before he drops and hits the ground. He turns and starts returning fire. Stan and Wongus drop to the ground beside the first dead guy, and crawl behind him for cover as they start shooting back. The VC fighter’s bullets start hitting the dead guy, whap whap, and his body jumps at each impact.
Wongus says, “What do you think we ought to do, Parker?”
Stan says to keep shooting. And then pretty soon another six or seven VC soldiers start shooting at them. Stan kills one of them. Then one by one, the VC soldiers break contact and disappear back into some trees. That’s the most frustrating thing of all: these bastards never stay and fight. The shooting stops and Stan looks up the trail, about fifty feet, and to the left.
“Holy mackerel, Wongus,” he says, “look at that.”
The enemy soldiers were in such a hurry to get away that they had forgotten their rucksacks. Stan counts seven of them, lined in a row. He says to Wongus, “Get on the radio and tell ’em we found these,” thinking that maybe this is a valuable intel cache that somebody should know about. A message comes back on the radio to wait for reinforcements to arrive in case this is a ploy to draw Stan and Wongus into the open for an ambush.
There’s nothing to do but wait. And waiting in the forest can be both nerve-racking and boring. Stan can’t stand it. He says to Wongus, “You know what? I’m going to run out here and grab a couple of those rucksacks.”
Wongus is incredulous, “You’re going to do what?”
Stan says, “Cover me. I’m going out there.”
“Parker, are you crazy?”
“There could be all kinds of souvenirs in those things,” Stan says.
“Souvenirs? Man, leave it.”
But before Wongus can finish, Stan is up and stepping onto the trail. The funny thing is that his feet won’t move. It feels like they have been nailed, or glued, to the earth. He tries to take a step forward and trips and stumbles. He regains his balance and tells Wongus once again, “Cover me,” but again he pitches forward, off-balance.
Stan tries a third time to walk, saying yet again, “Cover me.”
By this time, Wongus is practically rolling his eyes at Parker.
“What’re you gonna do,” he asks, “trip again?”
At the same time, Wongus doesn’t know why Stan can’t walk. Stan is equally confounded. He’s sitting looking at the booty rucksacks, thinking, Don’t this beat hell?, when, just then, the rucks start exploding, one by one, all seven of them, and debris starts flying everywhere, mostly paper, and roots and rocks, as each rucksack explodes.
Stan and Wongus duck down, and when they lift their heads, they quietly watch the smoke drift away. After a moment, Wongus says, “I’m sure glad you didn’t drag one of those damn things back here.”
And then something catches their attention. An NVA soldier jumps up from the brush about a hundred feet away, along the side of the trail, and he’s holding the detonators in his hand, with the wires leading to the small craters where the rucksacks used to be. He starts to run away down the trail but gets tangled up in the wires. He falls and then gets up. Stan and Wongus shoot him in the back, and the guy falls dead.
Wongus turns to Stan and says, “Your guardian angel, Parker. He was with you today. He nailed your feet to the trail.”
And Stan starts to believe him. Well, he already believes in the love of Jesus Christ, but he doesn’t think of himself as a proselytizer. After this episode, some of the other guys will start staying close to Stan. They will walk right behind him, wanting to be in his safe zone, his angel-heavy zone.
At night, before he sleeps, he’ll pray:
“Lord, I’m so tired, you’ve got to let me sleep.”
And: “If I go to sleep, I know we’re going to die.”
• • •
About thirty minutes after Stan and W
ongus narrowly escape the exploding rucksacks, the platoon comes under sudden fire in the village. Stan figures they are facing several hundred NVA and VC soldiers. The platoon is stopped among some hooches, with several rice paddies at their back. The enemy fire is coming from their front, and it occurs to Jerry Austin and others that the NVA and VC are trying to surround them. Austin rushes across a road to stop the flanking maneuver but finds himself outnumbered by dozens of fighters closing on him. Any minute he expects to be shot.
From his position across the road, Stan hears a call for help and recognizes the voice. It’s Austin yelling that his weapon has jammed.
Stan and Angel Rivera have been shooting at a group of NVA swarming on their left but quickly shift their fire. Stan springs to his feet and Rivera follows. Stan hollers at Rivera to get down and cover him. Stan runs several hundred feet into the grass and is suddenly standing next to Jerry. Jerry looks over at him, surprised. He had been sure he was about to be killed. The look that passes between them is electric; both men feel it. They are convinced that right now they are about to live or die together. They have never been so close to anyone in their lives. Jerry turns away from the fight and works to get his rifle operating again.