I avoided looking at Susan and said, “I wiped the blood off my knife on his pants, clipped the shovel on my belt, sheathed my knife, gathered my helmet and rifle, and started walking away. I looked up and saw two guys from my company, who’d come to find me, and they’d seen some of this. One guy took my rifle out of my hand and fired three signal shots in the air. He said to me, ‘The rifle works, Brenner.’ These guys looked at me… I mean, we were all a little nuts by then, but… this was above and beyond nuts, and they knew it.”
I thought a moment, trying to recall what happened next, then I said, “The other guy retrieved the AK-47, and he says to us, ‘The gook has a full magazine.’ He looked at me and says, ‘How the fuck did you get into hand-to-hand with this guy?’ I didn’t say anything, and the other guy says, ‘ Brenner, you’re supposed to shoot these fuckers, not get into knife fights with them.’ They both laughed. Then the guy picks up the machete and hands it to me, and he says, ‘Take the head back. No one’s going to believe this shit.’ So… I hacked off the dead man’s head… and the other guy fixed his bayonet to my rifle, and he picks up the head and sticks it on the bayonet and hands me my rifle…”
I glanced at Susan and continued, “So we go to rejoin the company, me holding up the head on the end of my rifle, and as we approach the company positions, one of the guys with me yells out, ‘Don’t shoot — Brenner’s got a prisoner,’ and everybody laughs… everybody wants to know what happened… a guy cuts a bamboo pole and sticks the head on the pole… I talk to the captain along with these two guys who found me… and I’m kind of out of it… I’m looking at this head, which is being paraded around on the pole…” I drew a deep breath. “That night, I was on a helicopter back to base camp… along with the head… where the company clerk handed me a three-day pass to Nha Trang.”
I looked at Susan and said, “So, that’s how I wound up in Nha Trang on R&R.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Susan and I walked silently down to the river where we did a leech check. She was clean, but I had a land leech on my back starting to bloat with blood.
I said to her, “Light up.”
She lit a cigarette, and I instructed her to heat the leech’s rear end without burning it or me. She put the cigarette close to the leech, and it backed off. She plucked it off my back and threw it away with a sound of disgust. She said, “You’re bleeding.”
She put a tissue on the leech bite and held it there until it stuck. We put our clothes on, and we sat on a rock by the riverbank.
She smoked, and I said, “I’ll take a drag.”
She handed me the cigarette, and I took a long pull, coughed, and gave her the cigarette. I said, “These aren’t good for you.”
“Who said they were?”
We sat there quietly and listened to the flowing water.
She finished her cigarette and asked, “How are you doing?”
“Okay.” I thought a moment and said, “Men who’ve been here have worse stories than that to tell… and I’ve seen worse… but there’s something about hand-to-hand. I can still smell that guy and see his face, and I can still feel his hair in my hand and the knife cutting into his throat…”
“Finish it.”
“Yeah… well, afterward, I was sorry I killed him. He should have lived. You know, like a defeated warrior who’s shown bravery.”
“Do you think he would have let you live?”
“No, but I shouldn’t have taken his head. An ear or a finger would have been enough.”
She lit another cigarette and said to me, “That’s not what’s really bothering you.”
I looked at her, and our eyes met.
We sat there, watching the river. Finally, I said, “I frightened myself.”
She nodded.
“I mean… where did that come from?”
She threw her cigarette in the river. She said, “It came from a place you never need to go to again.”
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel good about it… about taking the challenge and killing him.”
She didn’t reply.
I said, “But like a lot of traumatic events, I buried it very quickly, and by Day One in Nha Trang, it was the furthest thing from my mind. Except, now and then, it would pop back in my head.”
She nodded and lit another cigarette.
I said, “Then after I got home, I started to think about it more… like, Why did I do that? No one was egging me on, except him, and there was no rational reason for me to throw down my rifle and try to kill this guy with my shovel while he’s trying to hack me up with his machete. What the hell was I thinking?”
“Sometimes, Paul, it’s better to leave these things alone.”
“I suppose… I mean, I’ve seen war psychosis, and I’ve seen guys in combat who lose all fear for some reason, and I’ve seen the most inhuman and brutal behavior you can possibly imagine from normal guys. I’ve seen skulls used as paperweights or candle holders on the desks of officers and sergeants, I’ve seen American soldiers with necklaces made out of teeth or dried ears or finger bones, and I can’t tell you all the day-to-day atrocities I’ve seen on both sides… and it makes you wonder about who we are, and about yourself when you barely pay attention to it, and you really start wondering about yourself when you start participating. It was like a cult of death… and you wanted to belong…”
Susan stared at the flowing river, the smoke rising from her cigarette.
“Most guys arrived here normal, and they were shocked and sickened by the behavior of the guys who’d been here awhile. Then within a few weeks, they’d stop being shocked, and within a few months, a lot of them joined the club of the crazies. And most of them, I think, went home and became normal again, though some didn’t. But I never once saw anyone here who had gone around the bend ever return to normal while they were still here. It only got worse because in this environment they’d lost any sense of… humanity. Or, you could be nice and say they’d become desensitized. It was actually more frightening than sickening. A guy who’d sliced off the ear of a VC he’d killed that morning would be joking with the village kids and the old Mama-sans that afternoon, and handing out candy. I mean, they weren’t evil or psychotic, we were normal, which is what really scared the hell out of me.”
I realized I’d gone from “they” to “we,” which was the whole point; “they” became “we,” and “we” became me. Fuck Father Bennett, fuck St. Brigid’s church, fuck Peggy Walsh, fuck the Act of Contrition, fuck the confessional booth, and fuck everything I’d ever learned in school and at home. Just like that. It took about three months. It would’ve taken less time, but November and December in the Bong Son were kind of quiet. After Tet, Khe Sanh, and the A Shau, I would have killed my own brother if he was wearing the wrong uniform; in fact, a lot of the Vietnamese did.
Susan was still staring at the river, motionless, as though she didn’t want to make any abrupt movements while I was carrying my sharpened shovel.
I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t mean to pretend that I was the chaplain’s assistant. Far from it. We’d all gone crazy, but we all figured it was temporary and conditional. And if you’re lucky, someday you go home. But unfortunately, you take it home with you, and it changes you forever because you went to that dark place in your soul, the place most people know exists but have never been to, but you’ve been there for a long time and didn’t find it so terrible, nor do you feel an ounce of guilt, and that itself becomes the fear… and you go on with your life in the U.S.A., mingling again with normal people, laughing and joking, but carrying this thing inside you… this secret that Mom doesn’t know, and your girlfriend can’t guess at, except sometimes she knows something’s wrong… and now and then, you run into one of your own, someone who was there, and you swap stupid stories about getting drunk and getting laid, and hot landing zones, and dumb officers who couldn’t read a map, and the worst case of black clap you’ve ever had, and poor Billy or Bob who got greased, and this and that, but you never touch on things like those villagers who you blew away by accident, or not by accident, or about how many ears and heads you collected, or the time you cut someone’s throat with a knife…”