FIVE
I went over to Mama Snow’s place on Carpenter Street the following night. Ever since I had run into Alice at the supermarket the previous day, I couldn’t get her out of my head. While she would have said it was inappropriate to approach her at the store, seeing her at Mama Snow’s was always fine. It was where she worked.
She was a prostitute. And she meant a lot to me.
I was not a man who had ever frequented prostitutes, that is, until I met Alice. A lot of men enjoyed the company of prostitutes back in Vietnam, but I didn’t. In a way, I was too scared to, but more than that was the fact that I couldn’t possibly betray Doris. Doris was my great love, my soul mate, and she was back Stateside waiting for me to come home in one piece so we could live the rest of our lives together. I didn’t want to pick up the clap and bring that back to Doris as some kind of fucked-up gift.
The men in my company used to make fun of me for remaining celibate while we were in Vietnam, but joking around too much meant you weren’t paying attention, and if you weren’t paying attention, you died, just like that cat Krueger did.
It was my introduction to bloodshed, two weeks into my tour. This was in 1971. We were going north along this lightly worn path, and the tall trees were forming a double canopy. This blocked a lot of sunlight from hitting the path, but it also obscured the vision of our lieutenant colonel, who was monitoring us from the C&C ship. Slimy water was dripping from the leaves onto all of us, and this foreign liquid coating just made things worse—it was like it did the job of trapping all the heat in our bodies, like it wasn’t hot enough in that fucking country without getting rained on during a hot, cloudless day. Sometimes the humidity was all you could think about.
Some guys were strung-out. I came to understand that the number of addicted soldiers had grown exponentially since the late sixties. I couldn’t blame them—they called that place “the green hell” for a reason. Some guys were doing the dozens and talking shit in hushed tones, snickering about whores and children and knives, about blowing up livestock for no good reason, about getting action from each other’s mothers. Some guys were making fun of me for being what they called a “boy scout.”
Some guys—just a few—wore armbands and spoke out against what we were doing over there every step of the way. It was commonplace. More so than you would ever read about in the history books. But not a lot of guys were happy to be there, that much is fact, and there was only so much the sergeant could say about this thing with the armbands, and the “passive resistance” that some guys would offer up when they were asked to do something just a little bit above and beyond walking, and hell, there was maybe only so much he would’ve wanted to say as well.
We all kind of knew that if the shit hit the fan we’d protect each other, we’d be there. Just because some guys didn’t go along with things as much as other guys did didn’t mean they harbored hopes of seeing their brothers die. That’s what the fear of war did for most of us—it forged a bond between some of the men that can only be described as brotherhood.
Some guys were too wide-eyed and scared to join in on the verbal jab-fights, like me. What I was doing was watching the guys who didn’t say shit, the ones who just kept their eyes open and walked methodically, as if they’d dreamed about walking through that green nightmare all their lives, preparing for it, and they wanted to do it right. I figured if I kept my eyes on them, I’d have a warning a split second before danger reared its ugly head in the form of a half-buried claymore, a poorly disguised tripwire, a trapdoor. These careful men would at least see it coming, not like the lunatics who couldn’t shut up. Krueger was one of those lunatics.
Krueger seemed like the kind of guy who was born for combat, the kind of guy who was no doubt a bully from his first day of school on, and now that he was older and had an M16 (and an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder, taken from the burnt, dead hands of an NLF guerrilla), he had a whole nation of mostly unarmed people to fuck with. He was buff, and he shaved his head more often than his face. He had a big, white circle painted on the front of his helmet, and in the middle of that white circle was a red dot about the size of a quarter. He put that red dot there by rubbing in the blood of a farmer he’d killed just days before I met him. It was like he was asking for it.
Before long, that red spot turned brown, but the discoloration, the spot of human rust that decorated his head, just served to announce more clearly what it was, and what kind of man he was.
A scar decorated the left side of his neck, but it wasn’t from a firefight. The story he told was that a shoe-shine boy had set off a bomb in a nightclub one night during his first tour and killed a bunch of people. He was the only one to walk away, his only injury being a scrape from a piece of flying shrapnel that just missed his carotid artery.
“That’s the closest this goddamn yellow country ever got to me, and that’s only cuz I was drunk and getting handwork under my table.”
The whore had died, he said, her last act on this earth being the performance of a handjob on this lunatic Krueger. If you got him in the mood, he’d talk about the quality of it—the handjob—and how when he realized what had happened, that half his mates were dead and the little girl next to him was dead, he’d tried to loosen her grip on him but couldn’t.
He’d say, “I couldn’t get her to let go, but it didn’t bother me none. It was like even in death, she couldn’t get enough of me. To this day, her ghost goes crazy down there. And that, comrades, is why I’m always in such a pleasant goddamn mood,” and he’d laugh that crazy laugh of his.
Krueger was always on point. He had good ears, so if he heard someone talking smack behind his back, he’d turn around and give everyone shit.
I was a few heads back behind the crazy bastard, sandwiched between two of the quiet guys. One of them was our sergeant—Hooper was his name—and I just kept one eye on the sergeant and one on my feet.
Hooper was always deadpan. He never smiled, and even when the sun was at its most devastating, he’d never wrinkle his brow. He’d just squint like he was John Wayne. His movements were slow, deliberate, and his orders were quick and precise. He was able to tell who you were by the sound of your footsteps. I trusted him with my life.
I saw him flinch, like a cat hearing some noise you didn’t even know had happened, and I froze. Up ahead, a Bouncing Betty went off. Krueger’s upper half somersaulted through the air and came to rest in the mud. His legs and some of his torso all stayed attached, and it all got blown back a couple of feet. When that huge part of him came down it was feet-first, as if he had jumped backward, but then it crumpled down lifelessly, shattering any of the illusions we might have had that it was still possessed of spirit. We were covered in red like someone had set off a paint bomb. Two other men had been peppered with shrapnel—screws, bolts, bits of aluminum cans—and were groaning in the dirt.
Four men got mad and started firing into the green. The sergeant ordered a stop to that. Some guys didn’t do shit, just looked. Some guys cried. The sergeant walked up to a tree, crouched, and peered out into the jungle like he was a hawk. If anyone was out there, he would’ve seen them. He didn’t say a word.
I watched the sergeant and I cried. And I thought of Doris.
She and I were the big item in high school. I remember I would fidget to a higher and higher degree until three o’clock, when I finally got to see her. Doris and I always met out front of the school, and it was the same every day, the explosion of an almost spiritual happiness when her warm face would press up to mine, and we kissed. In my old age, I can see that the wait for her, that daily anticipation for the quitting bell, was almost as pleasurable as finally holding her, because it was the expectation of seeing her that always made for such a glorious payoff. We were going to get married when I came back. But that’s not a story I talk about.