THE WAVE CURLS and throws you down with a dash on green beach like a trash heap before miter-shaped mountains. Ground that is terra firma one minute, dirt, mud, or water the next. Jungles slow and green as turtles. Manhigh elephant grass — rolling patterns of water that shift and never settle — corralled off by half-submerged bamboo fences. Brown grass lined with the delicate shadows of barbed wire. Motionless heat, the sun falls, lead rain.
Here, everyone is vulnerable to blood. Flies smell through the flak down to the flesh. Sir Charles knows his shit. A ready-made nightmare in black pajamas. Sneaky too. Contaminate your C rations with black leeches. Or crawl up your unaware asshole — this Oriental suppository — a confirmed cholera kill. And beware of Mamma-san, her clit curled like a scorpion’s tail.
Here, distances change, thanks to the trickery of mountains and plains. Faraway things seem close and what’s close seems faraway. Time dense and real. Once you are short, you begin to see yourself as from a distance, like standing at the depot and waving at yourself on the train; you think in blocks of time no longer than a day, enter its passage on the improvised calendar scratched into the side of your helmet.
It hit you like that. You step from your bunker, all sense of time having left. Or you hear a mortar round whistling in. You jump up, snatch your rifle, dash into your flak jacket. You run for the bunker and jump. Sarge taps you on the shoulder. Go back to sleep, he says.
HUMPING. The legs doomed to muscular habit, carried by gravity and the sheer weight of sameness, for a body in motion tends to stay in motion, your lungs range wastes of air, and you move with erect urgency, on your way to meet a woman, your eye on the sparrow, the hairs of your body arched, wired to the landscape, running hot messages to the legs, advance a moment, only to wheel back in the shadows, your light quick bones, your eyes swollen to the world, both watcher and watched, body thrusting blindly through the jungle greens, and as the winds veer, you do also, running like a night-bound bird from beneath the sun’s touch, heat adding fifty pounds to your back, so you drive on like sharp steel, holding to life and breath, wet earth sinking beneath your rhythmic boots, a musical shuttle, your hungry stomach, a bellying canvas, echoing emptiness, hollow pools of mud, but the jungle unfurls new shades of green, the rustling tissue of the leaves, fluttering with a distinct texture, sweat darkens your skins, salt fragrance, the wait-a-minute vines fasten your ankles, the waist-high bush ever-ready to deal a low blow, limbs scratch your face and neck, but your skin soaks in the blood and sweat, staying your powers, this wet heat, your sweat cold and singing on your skin, don’t fall asleep now, put your back into it, haul a heap of memories, smothered chicken, sweet potato pie, a brew, your queen-sized bed, all the sweet pussy you had there, creepy sweat, making the helmet crawl on your head, white light changing, the horizon sharpens, the jungle again, shade out of sunshine, and you roll the great hull of your chest, oscillating your body like a gull, smooth sailing, steady motionless wings, the mountains now, flapping up there in the wind, ever-shifting movements of the whole body, twisting, wringing out blood that stinks like brass, barbed wire veins aching in a knot, but the legs are king, untouched in the eye of the storm, relaxed in silence, they smell the jump ahead, keep them in motion or freeze up mannequin-like, so your breathing speeds, your pulse quickens, pulled like a tide through the day, and in the white wake, a force stretches inside the marrow of your bones, a new sweat breaks over you like a crashing wave, emptying your mind, the drift of it everything, heat and image fade, drawing the fatigue out, peeling away dead flesh, old skin, bringing the second wind, you burn clean, blow skin, all of your muscles filling out, accomplishing the last few feet, your body feeling the dark set, fixed past motion, past color. Enough for today.
Truth to tell, as a technique for staying alive, humping seemed to make as much sense as anything. You’re a killer. Let your nuts hang. Though humping brings back all the feelings of self-pity you experienced after a thorough childhood whooping, after Pappa Simmons’s motion-hot belt scorched a black map into your behind. Dream it to yourself. You sit in a wheelchair, paralyzed. Pappa and Georgiana cry behind you, their guilty tears wetting your shoulder. Forgive us, we didn’t know. You say nothing, hate stitching your mouth shut. A year later, you are dead. Pappa and Georgiana are carried out from the funeral parlor, bowed over with grief. Forgive us, we didn’t know.
Your first months in the shit, you move wrapped in terror. Birds of fire rush for cover inside your head. You jump here and there with the histrionics of a bad actor rehearsing for the carnival of your death. Fucking New Guy. Slowly, by degrees (three months in the shit, you figure), a grunt learns to relax. By then fear has become so much a part of your flesh that it no longer bothers you. Your heart develops a reasonable rhythm. You master the fine points of killing and survival. For humping makes you tough and smart and capable, as the sun heats your helmet and scorches into your brain memories of your kills, from your first confirmed—Charlie came through the tall elephant grass. You let loose a whole clip — don’t overheat your weapon; squeeze the trigger in three-second bursts; and remember that every fifth bullet round is a red-tipped tracer — sixteen rounds right in the face. From the chin up, the face disappeared as if from acid. The body stood there and shivered. Took two steps forward and fell—to your most recent, your weapon resting easy in your arms, forging a new self, a matching of heart and muscle and will that force the old self into a premolded present. Tiny steps perfect in their knowing of the drum, follow the wound that is the river back to the sea. Relax. The worst that could happen, you could die. At least the humping would be over.
THE COMPANY CAMPED on a high saddle of the mountain. Been in the shit all day, humping bush and dragging through swamp. You dig a foxhole and fill up sandbags to fortify the trench. That done, you try to piss. Take a shit. Stubborn, pee and shit refuse to leave your body and be stranded in this foreign land.
You settle down on your haunches. View the night jungle through the starlight scope. (Nothing moved. Nothing ever moved. A dark flutter of leaves, perhaps.) Besides, halfway up the hill, your eyes have adjusted enough for you to discover that darkness contained its own light. And light here required shadow there.