Life at Chu Lai

                                                                Hunger 2

     I grabbed my mess kit and walked to the chow tent. We hadn't been getting much to eat lately; someone said the VC had cut the highway between us and Danang harbor, where our supplies came through. There was only one thing to eat: SOS on fried potatoes. At least it wasn't Spam, which was what we mostly had at that time. I remember two kinds of "shit on a shingle." The Navy kind was billed as "creamed chipped beef on toast," which we called "foreskin stew." This was the Marine Corps kind, basically just thick white gravy with bits of hamburger in it. A ladlefull of it was glopped over fried potatoes.

     It looked good, and they filled my tin with it. Hot damn: real food. I threw my legs across a bench and dug in. A blue-bottle fly nearly as big as the one that had spooked my team of horses in the hay harvest a few years before [see "Almost A Cowboy, posted 7/9/2010] came zooming in like something radar‑guided, and immersed itself in my SOS.

     I was pissed. I scooped the fly to the edge of the mess tin with my fork, and used the fork to clean as much gravy as possible away from the fly. Then I ate it all except what little was still sticking to the fly.

                                                             To Kill a Gook

     Four or five of us were in a tent, standing around a map table. A couple more guys came in from the last watch of the night in our machine gun bunker. They checked in with me; I had been Sergeant of the Guard for the night. Someone asked how their watch had gone.

     One expressed frustration. He said he was getting short, that he was fed up with all this guard duty where you're always on edge but nothing really cuts loose. Said he'd sure like to kill just one gook before he leaves this fucking place.

     There it was: the spark of recognition, of vigorous agreement, that arced around the circle of our faces; the darting of eyes as each of us recognized that all the others had been feeling the same thing. I did it too. I felt it; I meant it.

     "Right," I said. Grunts. Nods. Smiles.

                                                        Tam Ky

     Angelo Walters and I decided we had to get laid. Tam Ky was a good place, we'd heard. There were lots of bars where the girls worked; you just made the rounds till you found one you liked.

     We needed an official reason to go. Even in the Marine Corps, you can't tell your commanding officer, "Look, sir, I need to go get laid." He may know what you're up to, but you have to cover his ass by giving him a story in case you get busted.

     Joe was an electronics technician. He'd go to Tam Ky to check out some equipment. I was just a radio operator, so couldn't use that excuse. I'd go as his security. Joe showed up ready to go, carrying nothing but his tool box, which he'd emptied of most of the heavy stuff. "Jesus, Joe," I said, "where's your rifle? What if we get shot down on the way? What if the VC corner us in a bar?"

     "I don't wanna carry all that shit," he said. He grinned.  "You're my security man, right? I'll let you handle it." I went to the guard shack and loaded up with fragmentation grenades and 100 rounds of ammo for my M14. We went out to the helipad and hung around and asked a few questions till somebody pointed to a chopper revving up. We ran up and yelled "Tam Ky?" over the engine's roar and the door gunner waved us aboard.

     Tam Ky that day was like some Western boom town with all the miners either out working, or sleeping off hangovers. We went into a bar with one lone GI drinking in a corner. A bartender showed up and we ordered beers. A couple of bar girls came around, and we abandoned our beers and each went upstairs with one of the girls.

     She was tiny. She was a grown woman, mid‑twenties or so, but just tiny. Short, and very slim. Couldn't have weighed over ninety pounds. She had her dress off, and her quick‑release bra and panties, by the time I'd taken off my soft cover ‑ as we Marines called our cloth utility cap ‑ and hung it on a chair post, and found a safe place to lean my rifle against the wall where it wouldn't fall over and where I could get to it in a hurry by diving out my side of the bed.

     She sat on the bed and smiled as I undressed. She was trying to be pretty and inviting, trying to do her job. But fear was mixed in. I could see it. I had no idea what her life was like, how long she'd been a prostitute, how she'd been treated by her customers, how she'd been treated by the guy who was her last customer before me.

     Whatever that history was, she certainly had a history, and it flickered in her face as she watched me undress. I thought that part of her nervous smile was a plea for a sort of social contract: I'll be very nice and sweet to you and give you good sex if you'll be nice to me too, or if not nice, then at least not too mean.

     Watching her watch me undress ‑ disarm would be a better word ‑ I got the distinct feeling of seeing myself in a mirror. I began to see my movements as with someone else's eyes:

     I weighed about twice as much as she did. I wore glasses. I leaned a large, heavy, fully loaded automatic rifle against the wall where I could reach it easily. I took off my boots. I unhooked two fragmentation grenades from my belt suspender straps, set them carefully on their small flat bases on a little table a few feet from the bed, making sure their fuses were screwed all the way in. Then I looked at the large window that opened on the street, took the grenades off the table, moved the table farther from the window and closer to the bed, and put the grenades back on it. I checked the other grenades in my cargo pockets to make sure their fuses were screwed all the way in and their pins were bent all the way over and hadn't caught on anything and started to straighten or pull out. I unbuckled my cartridge belt, which carried four 20‑round magazines of 7.62mm ammunition, two one‑quart canteens of water, a first aid packet with battle dressing, and a sheathed bayonet. I lifted it off by the belt suspender straps which hung its weight from my shoulders, and lowered it carefully to the floor. I unbuckled the khaki web belt that held up my trousers, slipped its buckle back through the first belt loop to the left of my fly, and slid my sheath knife from the belt: the custom‑made, hand‑tempered, Randall #1 fighting knife with a seven inch blade with its top edge sharpened a third of the way up from the point, a double fighting hilt, a handle of stag antler with custom‑carved finger grips, a sharpening stone in its own pocket on the sheath, and this engraved on the blade:

                                              DEAN METCALF                   

2033406 USMC

     I set the knife on the table by the grenades, its handle toward the bed. I took off my jungle utility jacket, trousers, socks. Like most GIs in Vietnam, I wore no underwear. Too sweaty: it gave you crotch rot. I took off my dog tags, taped together with black plastic electrical tape to eliminate noise, and set them on the little table by my knife and grenades.

     Now we were both naked.