One to Count Cadence (38 page)

The grenade had exploded and the bits of shrapnel sung past while I was turned. I rolled, then fired toward the bushes, twice, but there was no answer. The grenade had cut the brush in front of him, and he lay on his back, his rifle blown away from him. I ran to him, circling to the left, but there was no need for the caution. The grenade must have caught him as he tried to stand and to duck my two rounds at the same time. The left leg was completely severed at the hip, the genitalia, a bloody stump, and the stomach wall split from hip to navel. The black pajamas had been blow off, and he was naked in his death. Warm gray intestines looped out of his torn belly, loops furrowed with gashes dripping decomposed rice. The stink sputtering out as the guts kept contracting as if the business of life went on as usual. The eyes turned back as I walked up, and the breath came as fast as the flutter of a bird’s wing. I shot him in the ear, then went to check the other.

He was dead, four bruise-ringed pin holes in a line up the chest; almost no blood in front; almost no flesh in back. An old rifle with wire holding the broken stock together lay beside the body. I shot him in the ear, then walked back up the slope to meet Tetrick and ten men coming at a dead flatfooted run.

(I know you’d rather hear about the fear, about my lungs seeming to lunge up my throat after air, about the infinitesimal but now eternal tremor clutching my hands, or about the dizzy reels of my brain, or the watery shit running down my leg. But you know that part by heart now. I did what I did. Two men died, two others lived, perhaps. It’s not supposed to make sense. Fear and trembling is no excuse; action is no reason; dead is dead.)

“You shoulda let them go,” Tetrick huffed as he arrived, grease gun swinging and fear in his face. “But you did good, kid.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Fine. How are the wounded?”

“Should be okay. Med-evac chopper’s coming quick.” He pointed over the hill where a black dot buzzed closer.

“Fine,” I said again, then walked on up the hill, the men behind me carrying the two bodies.

They laid the bodies in front of the spotting tower, and everyone had to come see them, to gape at the guts hanging out of the one like an atrophied papier-mâché leg, to slap me on the shoulder, to point out my brilliant shooting. It wasn’t unlike a successful hunt, back in camp with the drunk card players who only hunted peace from their pinched-faced Texas wives, middle-aged men with fawning mouths and bitter, envious eyes, and hands that grasped at your youth.

“Cover them up,” I said to Tetrick. “Jesus Christ, cover them up.”

“Let ‘em get used to it,” he answered.

And Morning answered too from behind: “Too late to be sensitive now. Not much to send home to Mamma, huh?”

I walked to my tent and lay down and let the fear wash out of me. When Morning walked into my tent, the shaking had just began to get bad, violent, like a fever convulsion, and the legs of my cot were rattling against the plank floor. A shaft of white hot sunlight plunged through the open flap into the blackness of my tent, and Morning’s face was black and his head outlined in fire-haze white.

“They say the first one does that to you. But you’ll get used to it,” he said as he stepped in.

I raged off the bunk without thought. One hand filled with his shirt, the other with the bayonet off my boot, I shoved him back toward the door, tripped him, then kneeled on his chest, the bayonet against his throat.

“You keep your mouth shut now. You let me alone now. I liked killing those stinking little animals. I pretended they were you and all your stupid bleeding heart kind.” I screamed, spittle flaying at his face like the dust motes suspended in the brilliant stab of sunlight. I lifted him off the floor, then shoved him out of the tent, followed him, pushed him again. He fell, rose angry, and started to come, but I had the bayonet low against my hip, and he stopped.

“You gutless mother-fucker,” he said. “You got guts enough to drop that nigger blade, I’ll bust your head for you.”

“When it happens, son,” I said, “You’re going to die. But I want you to kill first. I want things to be even; then there can be hair and brains all over the place, then, yours.”

He stepped back, his face twisted as if I’d hurt him. “No worry about that,” he muttered. “No worry.” He turned and wandered off, shaking his head, saying to Novotny, who had run up with some others, “What’s with him?”

Though the question hadn’t been meant to be answered, Novotny said, “Fuck with the bull, Morning, you get the horn.”

I walked back in the tent. Morning’s cigarettes were scattered across the muddy floor. He’d come to offer me one, yes, and his hand too, and his face had been twisted in pain as he walked away.
Joe, Joe, you can’t push and pull and fan around with life, then just say quits when you get ready.
I hadn’t given him time to say “sorry” and now he wouldn’t listen to mine. Hard-headed bastard. I would have killed him now, if he had come back to the tent. The game was over between us. Shit, shit, shit. I lay down in the darkness, alone now, calm, resigned, anger gone, fear gone. I slept.

* * *

Then came the idiot Lt. Dottlinger fast on the wings of a jet. The first, cracking over the compound like thunder, rolled me out of the bunk without waking me fully. Outside, still dazed, the second drove me to the ground where the rest of the men already were, including the third casualty of the day, the guard from the tower who had jumped and broken a leg when the first jet came over. Just as I stood up, asking “What the hell?” the first came again too fast to be real, wing cannons hammering at the earth, explosions of dust through the grass. The jungle never acknowledged any hits; the rounds might as well have never been fired. Then the second jet was back, firing in the same senseless way. Then the first again, laying napalm eggs at the edge of the trees, then the second, then both in a quick pass and dive at the hilltop, a waggle of wings and two brown faces and white smiles, and zip the South Vietnamese Air Force was gone, leaving behind one American casualty and one hell of a grass fire and one Lt. Dottlinger running out of the CP Bunker, shouting, “That’ll teach the commie little bastards. That’ll teach them.”

Capt. Saunders was heard to mutter, “Three weeks, you dumb son of a bitch.” Three weeks being the time left until the promotion list came out with Dottlinger passed over a third time and reduced to S/Sgt and transferred to another outfit. “Three weeks.”

The grass burned from the outer perimeter to the edge of the jungle trees, and the jungle itself might have burned except that it was still too green from the rains which had plagued our first week in Vietnam. When we tried to fight the fire with wet blankets, we lost two more men to smoke inhalation, so we could do nothing but stand and choke on smoke and grassy cinders and try to keep the tents from burning for four hours until the fire burned itself down and away toward the rolling hills below us, smoke plumes above it like the banners of a victorious army moving on to other, more significant engagements.

That night sparks winked all around us, and the canvas of our tents, soaked with water and smoke, seemed to breathe the heat directly at us. Most of the troops spent the night out of their tents, and there was much talking and laughter about the day. But I went where I could be almost alone, the cot in the guard section of the CP Bunker, underground, sitting with the sleeping supernumerary, the silent radioman, the humming tubes, the small lights, and myself.

* * *

You might wonder that I, experientially green as I was, could take on two men belonging to perhaps the best insurgent guerrilla force in the world, take them on, kill them, and walk away physically untouched. You might wonder, but I don’t. The deer I killed, the first one I told you about: I was nine. Deer are easier than men, but not easy. They hear with their feet and have eyes evolved for catching motion and noses bred for smelling the enemy. I was already a hunter; I only needed to find my game.

I know that hunting is out now, and all that, and I will be the first to admit that I never hunted out of a need for food nor, I hope, for sport, nor for the blood since that warm sticky smell has always slightly sickened me, but for the ritual, the remembering of the time when men needed to be both smart and strong, crafty and swift and silent of foot, the remembering. And I remembered well, and I was good…

All the things pressing…

Remember: I came from a working ranch, grew up digging fence post holes, driving a tractor, herding cattle more often with a Jeep than a horse but sometimes with a horse, riding in pickups with a rifle and shotgun racked behind me and a .38 in the glove box, cutting cattle and a few hogs while they protested the loss of their maleness. Remember I won my first fist fight when a kid laughed at the book of fairy tales I was reading on the school bus home, and I won a few and lost a few after that but never quit, and the first time I put on football equipment it felt right, and I did it well, and my high school time was spent learning to maim, to make the other guy quit, and I did it well, but other things too. Remember: I went away to be a college professor after Korea, to be educated, and in the process educated the girl down the road and lost her. I had killed and fought and drunk in Mexican whorehouses, but to those who would say — then, not now — to me, “beast, monster, killer,” I would answer, “See my degrees, examine my transcripts, my As and Bs.” And to those who would accuse “intellectual,” I could point to my trophies, the bear-skin rug from a honeymoon trip to Canada, the elk head and rack so large my father had to knock down a wall to put it in the living room across from the wall of books above the Krummel Journal when I shipped it from Washington. And if that wasn’t enough, I could show them the back of my hand with their blood on it. But that is the past past; for now I can say nothing. That’s not to say I’ve learned nothing, but that I know little.

Don’t be surprised that I had a troubled youth. I learned about masks long before Joe Morning.

But there are other things: Gut a bear, slice the thick belly skin with a keen knife, ease the blade through the membrane, cut around the anus and the genitals, split the diaphragm, reach up the chest cavity, grasp the esophagus and the larynx, cut them through, then pull from the top, pull the guts out with your hand, the pink lungs, the muscular heart smashed by a mushrooming lead-nosed bullet, the still-moving intestines, wash the clotted black blood off the ribs with an old cloth. But don’t stop there, skin the manlike carcass hanging from a barn rafter, pepper him to keep the flies away, let it cool as the weather decrees, then butcher, slice the flesh, saw the bones, and wrap the meat in freezer paper, eat the backstrap chicken-fried and roast the forelegs and smoke the rear, and eat your bear, knowing as you chew, as you digest, his mortality is yours, and this is what he would do to you, though with more animal reason and less waste, and even then what you’ve learned is only the beginning. It is not as simple as this, not at all, but this is a beginning.

If politicians, revolutionaries, reformers, preachers and priests, generals, Gold Star Mothers and the Daughters of the American Revolution, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Sons of the Republic, if they had to field dress and butcher and eat all the useless dead they contract with warriors to produce, then… God, how the beef market would fall.

You will excuse the digression. Looking back, it seems I’m saying that I butcher game with more love and understanding than I have when I butcher men. Don’t believe it. But don’t pity me, either. I may be down but I ain’t dead.

You
will
excuse the digression. As I told you, the smell of blood makes me slightly sick.

* * *

The rest of that week and the next were tense but busy. The antenna field was finished then mined, and that night two VC were killed trying to cut the cables. The bunkers were roofed with logs and sandbagged, and small concrete ammo bunkers were built into the sides of the mortar pits. An arrangement of pits and earthen walls protected all but the top half of the radio vans and the roofs were sandbagged against mortars. The generators and gasoline came, and a field kitchen too with cooks, stoves, and hot meals. The troops began to feel at home. They were brown and healthy, the last drop of San Miquel had been sweated out, and those who didn’t have cat fever looked as if they could go hunting bears with a willow switch, between trips to the latrine, that is. The Det had already dug eight and filled six latrines, and used enough toilet paper to raise wood pulp stocks 3 8/10 points on the big board.

On the morning before we were to begin operations at 1600 the next day, a Caribou chopper appeared filled with tons of warm beer. Saunders had saved our beer rations for one big bust. Everyone in the Det, except me, spent the whole day drinking warm Schlitz, puking, and getting totally wiped. I broke up seven different fights, none of which drew a bit of blood from either fighter, and pulled at least twenty men out of tangles with the wire, which drew a great deal of blood. They went on after sundown, as long as they could keep enough beer down to keep their buzz up, and I spent the night poking Benzedrine down sick, sleepy guards, praying they didn’t shoot each other, worried until I finally took the live rounds away from them, deciding that if the VC came this night we could hold them off just as well with empty beer cans. Once, on my rounds, I heard Saunders and Morning in one of the latrines talking about their football past, recounting every single football game they played in, saw, or even heard about. They really pissed me off. Who was I that I shouldn’t be drunk? Why was I always responsible? I stormed the latrine, shouted to Saunders that he could take care of his own god-damned Det because I was going to rack out, by God. As I walked away, I heard him say to Morning, “That Krummel is sure a mean drunk, huh?” The bastard, I thought, but I had to smile. And the next morning at 0600, he was up, showered, shaved, and handing me a fifth of Dewar’s, and the young men were up, out of their tents, as ready as they were ever going to be for what was to come. I had two pulls on the bottle, and when I lay down on my bunk, I was as peaceful as I had ever been.