5
When I came down into the basement, two skinny guys with thinning hair and untrimmed beards and dressed in parts of different uniforms were arranging a dozen folding chairs in a circle. An overweight, heavily mustached priest in a cassock striped with cigarette ash stood in front of a battered table drinking coffee from a paper cup. All three of them glanced at my splint. An old upright piano stood in one corner, and Bible illustrations hung on the cinder-block walls alongside colored maps of the Holy Land. Irregular brown stains discolored the concrete floor. I felt as though I had walked back into the basement of Holy Sepulchre.
The two skinny vets nodded at me and continued setting up the chairs. The priest came up and grabbed my hand. "Welcome. I'm Father Joe Morgan, but everybody usually calls me Father Joe. It's your first time here, isn't it? Your name is?"
I told him my name.
"And you were in Nam, of course, like Fred and Harry over there—like me, too. Before I went to the seminary, that was. Ran a riverboat in the Delta." I agreed that I had been in Nam, and he poured me a coffee from the metal urn. "That's how we started out, of course, guys like us getting together to see if we could help each other out. These days, you never know who could turn up—we get fellows who were in Grenada, Panama, boys from Desert Storm."
Fred or Harry sent me a sharp, dismissive look, but it didn't refer to me.
"Anyhow, make yourself at home. This is all about sharing, about support and understanding, so if you feel like letting it all hang out, feel free. No holds barred. Right, Harry?"
"Not many," Harry said.
By six, another seven men had come down into the basement, three of them wearing old uniform parts like Harry and Fred, the others in suits or sport jackets. Most of them seemed to know each other. We all seemed to be about the same age. As soon as we took our chairs, five or six men lit cigarettes, including the priest.
"Tonight we have two new faces," he said, exhaling an enormous cloud of gray smoke, "and I'd like us to go around the circle, giving our names and units. After that, anybody who has something to say, jump right in."
Bob, Frank, Lester, Harry, Tim, Jack, Grover, Pee Wee, Juan, Buddy, Bo. A crazy quilt of battalions and divisions. The jumpy little man called Buddy said, "Well, like some of you guys know from when I was here a couple of weeks ago, I was a truck driver in Cam Ranh Bay."
I immediately tuned out. This was what I remembered from the veterans' meeting I'd attended four or five years before, a description of a war I never saw, a war that hardly sounded like war. Buddy had been fired from his messenger job, and his girlfriend had told him that if he started acting crazy again, she'd leave him.
"So what do you do when you act crazy?" someone asked. "What does that mean, crazy?"
"It gets like I can't talk. I just lay up in bed and watch TV all day long, but I don't really see it, you know? I'm like blind and deaf. I'm like in a hole in the ground."
"When I get crazy, I run," said Lester. "I just take off, man, no idea what I'm doin', I get so scared I can't stop, like there's something back there comin' after me."
Jack, a man in a dark blue suit, said, "When I get scared, I take my rifle and go up on the roof. It's not loaded, but I aim it at people. I think about what it would be like if I started shooting."
We all looked at Jack, and he shrugged. "It helps."
Father Joe talked to Jack for a while, and I tuned out again. I wondered how soon I could leave. Juan told a long story about a friend who had shot himself in the chest after coming back from a long patrol. Father Joe talked for a long time, and Buddy started to twitch. He wanted us to tell him what to do about his girlfriend.
"Tim, you haven't said anything yet." I looked up to see Father Joe looking at me with glistening eyes. Whatever he had said to Juan had moved him. "Is there anything you'd like to share with the group?"
I was going to shake my head and pass, but a scene rose up before me, and I said, "When I first got to Nam, I was on this graves registration squad at Camp White Star. One of the men I worked with was called Scoot." I described Scoot kneeling beside Captain Havens' body bag, saying He nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects, and told them what he had done to the body.
For a moment no one spoke, and then Bo, one of the men in clothing assembled from old uniforms, said, "There's this thing, this place I can't stop thinking about. I didn't even see what the hell happened there, but it got stuck in my head."
"Let it out," said the priest.
"We were in Darlac Province, way out in the boonies, way north." Bo leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. "This is gonna sound a little funny." Before Father Joe could tell him to let it out again, he tilted his head and glanced sideways in the circle at me. "But what, Tim? what Tim said reminded me. I mean, I never saw any American do that kind of junk, and I hate it when people talk like that's all we ever did. You want to make me crazy, all you gotta do is tell me about so-called atrocities we did over there, right? Because personally, I never saw one. Not one. What I did see, what I saw plenty of times, was Americans doing some good for the people over there. I'm talking about food and medicine, plus helping kids."
Every man in the circle uttered some form of assent—we had all seen that, too.
"Anyhow, this one time, it was like we walked into this ghost town. The truth is, we got lost, we had this lieutenant fresh out of training, and he just got lost, plain and simple. He had us moving around in a big circle, which he was the only one who didn't understand what we were doing. The rest of us, we said, fuck it, he thinks he's a leader, let him lead. We get back to base, let him explain. So we're out there three-four days, and the lieutenant is just beginning to get the picture. And then we start smelling this fire."
"Like an old fire, you know? Not like a forest fire, like a burning building. Whenever the wind comes in from the north, we smell ashes and dead meat. And pretty soon, the smell is so strong we know we're almost on top of it, whatever it is. Now the lieutenant has a mission, he can maybe save his ass if he brings back something good—hell, it doesn't even have to be good, it just has to be something he can bring back, like he was looking for it all along. So we hump along through the jungle for about another half hour, and the stench gets worse and worse. It smells like a burned-down slaughterhouse. And besides that, there's no noise around us, no birds, no monkeys, none of that screeching we heard every other single day. The jungle is deserted, man, that fucker's empty, except for us."
"So in about half an hour we come up to this place, and we all freeze—it isn't a hamlet, it isn't a ville, it's out in the jungle, right? But it looks like some kind of town or something, except most of it's burned down, and the rest of it is still burning. You could tell from the charred stakes that there used to be a big stockade fence around it—some of it's still sticking up. But we can see this goddamn grid, with little tiny lots and everything, where these people had their huts all lined up on these narrow streets. All this was straw, I guess, and it's gone—there's nothing left but holes in the ground, and some flooring here and there. And the bodies."
"Lots of bodies, lots and lots of bodies. Someone pulled a lot of them into a big pile and tried to burn them, but all that happened was they split open. These were all women and children, and a couple old men. Yards—the first Yards I ever saw, and they're all dead. It looked like that Jonestown, that Jim Jones thing, except these bodies had bullet holes. The stink was incredible, it made your eyes water. It looked like someone had all these people stand in a big ring and then just blasted them to pieces. We didn't say a word. You can't talk about what you don't understand."