The Vietnam Reader (85 page)

Sam said, “If you ran away when you were little, and you think it’s childish to run out here, don’t you think you do the same thing? Don’t you think it’s childish to do what you do, the way you hide and won’t get a job, and won’t have a girlfriend? Anita’s a real pretty woman and it just kills me that you won’t go with her.”

Emmett’s head fell forward with sobs. He cried. Sam hadn’t seen him cry like that. The sobs grew louder. He tried to talk and he couldn’t. He couldn’t even smoke his cigarette.

“Don’t talk,” she said. He kept crying, his head down—long throaty sobs, heaving helplessly. Sam let him cry. She heard him say “Anita.” She was afraid. Now, at last. She went into the woods to pee and when she got back he was still crying. He sounded exactly like a screech owl. She touched his shoulder, and he shoved her hand away
and kept crying—louder now, as though now that they were out in the woods, and it was broad daylight, and there were no people, he could just let loose.

His cry grew louder, as loud as the wail of a peacock. She watched in awe. In his diary, her father seemed to whimper, but Emmett’s sorrow was full-blown, as though it had grown over the years into something monstrous and fantastic. His cigarette had burned down, and he dropped it over the railing.

They walked back to the car. Sam sat in the car and Emmett, still crying, sat on the hood. His bulk made the car shake with his sobs. Sam reached in her backpack and wormed out a granola bar. She resisted the temptation to turn on the car radio. An old song, “Stranded in the Jungle,” went through her mind. A flash from the past. A golden oldie. It would be ironic if the car wouldn’t start. But Cawood’s Pond was beginning to seem like home. She and Emmett could stay out here. Emmett’s ability to repair things would come in handy. He could rig them up a lean-to. He could dig them a foxhole. It still made her angry that she couldn’t dig a foxhole. That woman Mondale nominated could probably dig one.

She had left the car door open. Emmett hung on the door and bent down to speak to her through the window. He said, “You ran off. When you ran off I thought you were dead.”

“No, I wasn’t dead. What made you think that?”

“I thought you’d left me. I thought you must have gone off to die. I was afraid you’d kill yourself.”

“Why would you think that?”

“So many kids these days are doing it. On the news the other day, those kids over in Carlisle County that made that suicide pact—that shook me up.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Sam said.

“But how was I to know? You were gone, and I didn’t know what might have happened to you. I thought you’d get hurt. It was like being left by myself and all my buddies dead. I had to find you.”

“Thank you.” She wadded up the granola wrapper and squeezed it in her hand. She said, “You’ve done something like that before, Emmett.
When you went to Vietnam, you went for Mom’s sake—and mine.”

He nodded thoughtfully. He said, “It wasn’t what you wanted, was it? It wasn’t what Irene wanted. Then she got stuck with me because of what I did for her. Ain’t life stupid? Fuck a duck!”

“Get in, Emmett,” she said, reaching to open the door on the passenger side.

“No. I ain’t finished.” His face was twisted in pain and his pimples glistened with tears. He said, “There’s something wrong with me. I’m damaged. It’s like something in the center of my heart is gone and I can’t get it back. You know when you cut down a tree sometimes and it’s diseased in the middle?”

“I never cut down a tree.”

“Well, imagine it.”

“Yeah. But what you’re saying is you don’t care about anybody. But you cared enough about me to come out here. And you cared about Mom enough to go over there.”

“But don’t you understand—let me explain. This is what I do. I work on staying together, one day at a time. There’s no room for anything else. It takes all my energy.”

“Emmett, don’t you want to get married and have a family like other people? Don’t you want to do something with your life?”

He sobbed again. “I
want
to be a father. But I can’t. The closest I can come is with you. And I failed. I should never have let you go so wild. I should have taken care of you.”

“You cared,” she said. “You felt something for me coming out here.” She felt weak. Now her knees felt wobbly. She got out of the car and shut the door.

“I was afraid,” he said. “Come here, I want to show you something.” He led her to the boardwalk, and they looked out over the swamp. He pointed to a snake sunning on a log. “That sucker’s a cottonmouth.”

“I wish that bird would come,” Sam said.

“You know the reason I want to see that bird?”

“Not really.”

“If you can think about something like birds, you can get outside of
yourself, and it doesn’t hurt as much. That’s the whole idea. That’s the whole challenge for the human race. Think about that. Put your thinking cap on, Sam. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! But I can barely get to the point where I can be a self to get out of.”

Sam picked a big hunk of fungus off a stump and sniffed it. It smelled dead. Emmett said, “I came out here to save you, but maybe I can’t. Maybe you have to find out for yourself. Fuck. You can’t learn from the past. The main thing you learn from history is that you can’t learn from history. That’s what history is.”

Emmett flung a hand toward the black water beside the boardwalk. “See these little minnows? It looks like they’ve got one eye on the top of their heads. They’re called topwaters. They’re good for a pond. Catfish whomp ’em up. See that dead tree? That’s a woodpecker hole up there. But a wood duck will build a nest there.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I’ve watched ’em. There are things you can figure out, but most things you can’t.” He waved at the dark swamp. “There are some things you can never figure out.”

He turned and walked ahead of her, walking fast up the path from theboardwalk. She followed. He entered a path into the woods and walked faster. Poison ivy curled around his shoes. From the back, he looked like an old peasant woman hugging a baby. Sam watched as he disappeared into the woods. He seemed to float away, above the poison ivy, like a pond skimmer, beautiful in his flight.

Incoming
K
EVIN
BOWEN
1994

Incoming

Don’t let them kid you—
The mind no fool like the movies,
doesn’t wait for flash or screech,
but moves of its own accord,
even hears the slight
bump the mortars make
as they kiss the tubes good-bye.
Then the furious rain,
a fist driving home a message:
“Boy, you don’t belong here.”
On good nights they walk them in.
You wait for them to fall,
stomach pinned so tight to ground
you might feel a woman’s foot
pace a kitchen floor in Brownsville;
the hushed fall of a man lost
in a corn field in Michigan;
a young girl’s finger trace
a lover’s name on a beach along Cape Cod.
But then the air is sucked
straight up off the jungle
floor and the entire weight
of Jupiter and her moons

presses down on the back of a knee.
In a moment, it’s over.
But it takes a lifetime to recover,
let out the last breath
you took as you dove.
This is why you’ll see them sometimes,
in malls, men and women off in corners;
the ways they stare through the windows in silence.

In the Lake of the Woods
T
IM
O’B
RIEN
1994

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

The war was aimless. No targets, no visible enemy. There was nothing to shoot back at. Men were hurt and then more men were hurt and nothing was ever gained by it. The ambushes never worked. The patrols turned up nothing but women and kids and old men.

“Like that bullshit kid’s game,” Rusty Calley said one evening. “They hide, we seek, except we’re chasin’ a bunch of gookish fucking ghosts.”

In the dark someone did witch imitations. Someone else laughed. For Sorcerer, who sat listening at his foxhole, the war had become a state of mind. Not bedlam exactly, but the din was nearby.

“Eyeballs for eyeballs,” Calley said. “One of your famous Bible regulations.”

All through February they worked an AO called Pinkville, a chain of dark, sullen hamlets tucked up against the South China Sea. The men hated the place, and feared it. On their maps the sector was shaded a bright shimmering pink to signify a “built-up area,” with many hamlets and paddy dikes and fields of rice. But for Charlie Company there was nothing bright about Pinkville. It was spook country. The geography of evil: tunnels and bamboo thickets and mud huts and graves.

On February 25, 1968, they stumbled into a minefield near a village called Lac Son.

“I’m killed,” someone said, and he was.

A steady gray rain was falling. Thunder advanced from the mountains to the west. After an hour a pair of dustoff choppers settled in. The casualties were piled aboard and the helicopters rose into the rain with three more dead, twelve more wounded.

“Don’t mean zip,” Calley said. His face was childlike and flaccid. He turned to one of the medics. “What’s up, doc?”

Three weeks later, on March 14, a booby-trapped 155 round blew Sergeant George Cox into several large wet pieces. Dyson lost both legs. Hendrixson lost an arm and a leg.

Two or three men were crying.

Others couldn’t remember how.

“Kill Nam,” said Lieutenant Calley. He pointed his weapon at the earth, burned twenty quick rounds. “Kill it,” he said. He reloaded and shot the grass and a palm tree and then the earth again. “Grease the place,” he said. “Kill it.”

In the late afternoon of March 15 John Wade received a short letter from Kathy. It was composed on light blue stationery with a strip of embossed gold running along the top margin. Her handwriting was dark and confident.

“What I hope,” she wrote him, “is that someday you’ll understand that I need things for myself. I need a productive future—a real life. When you get home, John, you’ll have to treat me like the human being I am. I’ve grown up. I’m different now, and you are too, and we’ll both have to make adjustments. We have to be looser with each other, not so wound up or something—you can’t
squeeze
me so much—I need to feel like I’m not a puppet or something. Anyway, just so you know, I’ve been going out with a couple of guys. It’s nothing serious. Repeat: nothing serious. I love you, and I think we can be wonderful together.”

Sorcerer wrote back that evening: “What do you get when you breed VC with rats?”

He smiled to himself and jotted down the answer on a separate slip of paper.

“Midget rats,” he wrote.

…

At 7:22 on the morning of March 16, 1968, the lead elements of Charlie Company boarded a flight of helicopters that climbed into the thin, rosy sunlight, gathered into assault formation, then banked south and skimmed low and fast over scarred, mangled, bombed-out countryside toward a landing zone just west of Pinkville.

Something was wrong.

Maybe it was the sunlight.

Sorcerer felt dazed and half asleep, still dreaming wild dawn dreams. All night he’d been caught up in pink rivers and pink paddies; even now, squatting at the rear of the chopper, he couldn’t flush away the pink. All that color—it was wrong. The air was wrong. The smells were wrong, and the thin rosy sunlight, and how the men seemed wrapped inside themselves. Meadlo and Mitchell and Thinbill sat with their eyes closed. Sledge fiddled with his radio. Conti was off in some mental whorehouse. PFC Weatherby kept wiping his M-16 with a towel, first the barrel and then his face and then the barrel again. Boyce and Maples and Lieutenant Calley sat side by side in the chopper’s open doorway, sharing a cigarette, quietly peering down at the cratered fields and paddies.

Pure wrongness, Sorcerer knew.

He could taste the sunlight. It had a rusty, metallic flavor, like nails on his tongue.

For a few seconds, Sorcerer shut his eyes and retreated behind the mirrors in his head, pretending to be elsewhere, but even then the landscapes kept coming at him fast and lurid.

At 7:30 the choppers banked in a long arc and approached the hamlet of Thuan Yen from the southwest. Below, almost straight ahead, white puffs of smoke opened up in the paddies just outside the village. The artillery barrage swept across the fields and into the western fringes of Thuan Yen, cutting through underbrush and bamboo and banana trees, setting fires here and there, shifting northward as the helicopters skimmed in low over the drop zone. The door gunners were now laying down a steady suppressing fire. They leaned into their big guns, shoulders twitching. The noise made Sorcerer’s eyelids go haywire.

“Down and dirty!” someone yelled, and the chopper settled into a wide dry paddy.

Mitchell was first off. Then Boyce and Conti and Meadlo, then Maples, then Sledge, then Thinbill and the stubby lieutenant.

Sorcerer went last.

He jumped into the sunlight, fell flat, found himself alone in the paddy. The others had vanished. There was gunfire all around, a machine-gun wind, and the wind seemed to pick him up and blow him from place to place. He couldn’t get his legs beneath him. For a time he lay pinned down by things unnatural, the wind and heat, the wicked sunlight. He would not remember pushing to his feet. Directly ahead, a pair of stately old coconut trees burst into flame.

Just inside the village, Sorcerer found a pile of dead goats.