What if what?
I couldn't answer that one.
"I'll get your coat and boots,"
Connie said.
I picked up one of the candles. "I'm going to the den for a minute."
She turned around, silhouetted in the orange candlelight, her blue eyes touched with green. What-"
"To get the pistol. It's time to load it."
6
For the first time in weeks, I dreamed. It was a replay of the old, once familiar nightmare:
I was pinned down by enemy rifle fire, lying in a meager patch of scrub brush, forty yards from the base of the long slope that was referred to on ordnance maps as Hill #898. The flatland that we held was swampy; the rain fell hard and fast, impacting with an endless snap!snap!snap! on the vegetation and on my fatigues. When it struck my face, it stung as if it were a swarm of insects.
A bullet would feel the same as the droplets of rain felt: a brief and surprisingly sharp sting, a minute convulsion, nothing more. The only interesting difference would be in what took place afterwards. If it were a bullet instead of a raindrop, then perhaps nothing at all would take place afterwards, nothing whatsoever, only endless emptiness.
Through the flat, shiny leaves of the waist-high dwarf jungle, I had an excellent view of the crest of the hill where the Cong had dug in. Now and again something moved up there, soliciting a burst of fire from our own positions. Otherwise, it was like a gray-green skull, that hill, featureless and dead and unspeakably alien. The rain washed down over it; thick fingers of mist sometimes obscured the summit; yet it did not seem possible that it could be a natural piece of this landscape.
It looked, instead, as if it had come from some other world or time and had been dropped here on the whim of a celestial Power.
When the attack finally came the scene was even less real than it had been before: twisted, grotesque, shifting and changing like a face in a funhouse mirror.
There were thirty-seven of us in the thick tangle of rubbery plants, awaiting helicopter-borne reinforcements.
More than a hundred and fifty of the enemy held Hill #898, and they had made the decision that we had all been afraid they would make: it was best for them if they overran us, wiped us out, and then dealt with the helicopters when they tried to land.
They came.
Screaming
That was the worst of it. They came down that hill with no regard for our return fire, a wave of them, their front ranks armed with machine guns that were used most effectively, the men in the second and third ranks holding their rifles over their heads and screaming, screaming wordlessly. In seconds, before more than a score of them could be brought down, they had gained the brush: the situation had deteriorated into hand-to-hand combat.
The moment they had started down the hill, I had torn the sheet of thin, transparent plastic-like a dry cleaner's bag-from my rifle and let the rain hit it for the first time. But the screams so paralyzed me that I couldn't fire. Screams, distorted yellow faces, the mist, the torrential rain, the tooth of Hill #898, the rubbery plants If I fired at them, I would be admitting that the entire thing was real. I was not up to that just yet.
When they were upon us, I stumbled to my feet, jarred out of the dangerous trance by a sudden and awful awareness of my mortality. Four of the enemy seemed maniacally determined to destroy me, no one else, just me, me alone, as if I were some personal enemy of theirs and not just any American. I caught the first of them with a shot through the chest, blew off the face of the second one, opened the stomach of the third, and placed two shots in the chest of the last man. Two shots: the first did not stop him. It had been in the center of his chest, heart-center, yet he came forward as if he were an automaton. The second bullet jerked him to the left and slowed him down considerably, but it did not stop him either. A half-breath later, he slammed into me. The thin blade of his rifle bayonet ripped through my shoulder, bringing lightning with it, pain like lightning, sharp and bright. We both went down in the wet scrub brush-and I blacked out.
When I came to, the world was utterly silent, without even the voice of the rain.
Something heavy bore down on me, and I felt curiously numb.
But I was alive. Wasn't I? That was something, anyway. That was really something. Wasn't it?
I opened my eyes and found that the dead soldier lay atop me. His head was on my left shoulder, his face turned towards me. His black eyes were open, as was his mouth. He looked as if he were still screaming.
I tried to push him off, cried out as an intense wave of pain gushed down the right side of my body, and collapsed back against the soggy earth.
Carefully I turned my head away from him and looked at my right shoulder where the bayonet had driven all the way through and into the earth beneath me. The dead man's hands had slipped down until they clenched the end of the barrel where the haft of the knife was affixed. I tried to reach across the body and pry those fingers loose. They were coiled so tightly around the weapon that I could not move them, not as weak and frightened as I was. Each tune I made another attempt to shake off the body or free the bayonet, the blood bubbled out of my wound and soaked the sleeve of my shirt. Already, I was drawing ants.
We lay there for eleven hours. The ants came and scouted my face and chose to let me go until I died. They crawled inside the yellow man's open mouth and clustered over his eyes. I didn't want to watch them, yet I found myself staring helplessly. Time stretched into weeks and months: minutes became hours, tune was distorted, appeared to slow down-yet I seemed to be careening at a frightening speed down a narrow tube of time, toward a round black exit into nothingness.
Screaming
This time it was me.
I remembered the other three men I had killed, and my mind filled with images of rotting corpses, although I could not see them from where I lay. Four men
So what? I had killed a dozen men on other missions.
Screaming
Now stop it, I told myself.
But I couldn't stop.
I might have killed a dozen men before this-but they had not seemed like men to me. The killing had been done from a distance, and I had been able to think of my targets as, simply, "the enemy".
That made it impersonal, acceptable. Euphemisms made it seem like little more than target practice. But now, lying here in the scrub, I could not avoid the truth, could not avoid the fact that these were men I had killed. I saw my own sin-and my own mortality-in vivid terms. I saw that these were men, saw the un deniable truth, because I was looking directly into one of their faces (and
Death looking back at me), looking into an open mouth full of bad teeth (and
Death grinning in the rictus), looking at an earlobe that had been pierced for a ring that wasn't there now (and Death holding the ring out to me in one bony hand), looking at chapped lips
When they found me eleven hours later, I asked them to please kill me.
The medic said, "Nonsense." The chattering heli copter blades made his words sound disjointed, mechanical. "You've been badly hurt, but you're well enough. You're incredibly lucky!"
And then the dream began all over again. I was lying in scrub brush at the bottom of Hill #898, waiting for the enemy to attack, my rifle wrapped in plastic
I woke, coated with perspiration, my hands full of twisted sheets and blankets.
In real life the battle for Hill #898 had happened only once, of course. But at night when I dreamed, it played over and over and over like a film loop in my mind. That was, however, the only important difference between the reality and the remembrance.
All the ingredients of a nightmare had been there in the genuine event; there was, therefore, no need for me to add anything to sharpen the horror.