SOLDIER TIN, BODIES OF WATER

1968: Out of the Marine Corps, out of Vietnam. I went back to Southeast Asia as a journalist for the summer between my junior and senior years. For the following story, I spent a week in a US Special Forces “A” team camp in the Vietnamese highlands near Cambodia and Laos….

2. Soldier Tin

     Master Sergeant Robert F. Williams (home of record: Las Vegas, Nevada) was showing me around the compound. The trenches had been dug in a zig‑zag pattern so that an enemy grenade or man would only be effective for a short distance should it or he make it over the revetment and into the trench. The trench was punctuated at strategic points by flimsy blockhouses which doubled as machine gun emplacements and homes for Montagnard families.

     Of the low, tin‑roofed buildings similar in construction to the team house, one was a dispensary, and another, in Williams' words, was "the Yards' chow hall". The last syllable of the French word "Montagnard" sounds like "yard", so that's what the Americans called them.

     We went inside the chow hall. It was dark, cool, and smelled and felt of bare wood timbers and earth. When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see dim figures squatting about on top of rough wooden tables, eating rice and boiled meat from metal pots with their hands. Williams was telling me how a Special Forces "A" Team and a CIDG unit worked together.

     "We're s'posed to be mostly just advisors, but you know that's bullshit. We command, and it turns out, we do most of the fighting. What we do is send out Yard patrols, anywhere from a squad to a comp'ny with one American along to run the show and keep radio contact with the team house...here's Tin. You heard about him yet?"

     The dark figure stood and saluted as we came up to him. (The Montagnards at Mangbuk saluted all Americans regardless of their dress or status; it was as if they assumed that we were all soldiers, just as they were all soldiers.) In the dark, I couldn't see any difference between Tin and the others.

     "He was with the VC for four years," Williams was saying as we went out into the sunlight, blinding now against our enlarged pupils. "Then he came over to us. Some of the 'yards still don't trust him; they say he's different. For that matter, some of the guys on the team won't turn their backs on him. Hell, I trust him. Absolutely the best man on a trail I ever seen. Never wears shoes, walks like a cat in the jungle, sort of feels it when we're gettin' close to somethin'. 'Fact, he is half animal. But he sure knows that goddamned jungle."

      All the Montagnards were primitive people, and there seemed to be an openness and absence of guile in their faces which I associated with their primitiveness, and which I liked them for, as did most Americans who knew them. It was as if their looks cut across cultural barriers with a bridge of pure humanity. By "looks", I mean both the way they appeared when we looked at them, and the way they looked at us, the way their eyes communicated who they were.

     I saw Tin later out in the compound, in the daylight. He had a primitive look about him too, but it was somehow startlingly different from the simplicity which I saw in the eyes of the others. Williams was right. Tin was wild: in the way he moved, in the way he stood still, and most of all in his eyes.

     I stayed with the team about a week. One night, the night I especially remember, started out pretty much as usual: the orphan children who cooked and cleaned for the Americans had cleared away the dishes, a routine squad‑sized patrol of just Montagnards was sent out for the night, and the team members sat around the team house playing cards, cleaning weapons, listening to the tape recorder, or just talking.

     I was downstairs, or in the kitchen or somewhere out of the way, when I felt that something was wrong. By the time I got to the team room, every motion and every sound by every man there was tersely professional.

     Captain Moroney was talking to the man who had been on radio watch to keep contact with the security patrol. The Montagnard was excited, confused, and having a hard time with his pidgin English. Moroney was trying to calm him down and get the story about what had happened.

     "Tin, he shoot...pow!...he...CIDG...he...."

     "Looks like we've made contact," Moroney was saying. The other Americans were already moving to their weapons: magazines slid into receivers, bolts clicked home; men shrugged into flak jackets and buckled on cartridge belts. Moroney told his American radio operator to advise Kontum of the VC contact and stand by for details.

     "Anybody hit?" Moroney asked the Montagnard. "CIDG ‑ he hit?"

     "Yeah, Tin, he shoot...CIDG, he hit...two, t'ree, four...Krip, he dead."

     "Oh, fuck...look, you tell CIDG he come home, okay? Right now." The Montagnard hurried out, stumbling. "Well," Moroney said to his own men, "let's get out there." Suddenly remembering that he had an atypical factor to consider, Moroney looked over at me. He reached behind himself, snatched a .45 pistol with its belt and holster from its peg on the wall, and tossed it to me. "You were a Marine, right? You'll know how to use this, then." I buckled it on.

     The patrol had not been far away, and had started back right after the shooting. Moroney and his men met them in the jungle on the far side of the airstrip. We could tell from their flashlight beams that they were soon on the way back in, and that for some reason Moroney expected no further contact with the VC, or he would not have used the lights.

     "Well, mister reporter, looks like you get a story after all," the medic said to me on his way out of the team house. "Wanna come down to the dispensary and watch me sew 'em up?" I followed him out.

     Down in the dispensary, we started clearing off the operating table and the benches for patients who could sit. Tucker, the medic, got out a bottle of intravenous solution and hung it on a stand above the operating table. "Always need that, no matter what else happens," he grinned. "We ain't got any blood, but at least we can replace some of the fluid...wonder how many are hit...fuck, I hope this don't keep me up all night."

     First we heard excited voices coming from the direction of the camp gate, then shuffling and scraping noises. Then they burst into the room. One man had a shattered hand, one had a bullet through his leg, one had a bullet through his groin, and one had a bullet through his head: it had entered under his chin and come out through his left temple. He should not have been alive, but he was. It was Tin.

     Tucker looked quickly at each of the four wounded. It was triage time. He paused for a moment between Tin and the man with the bullet through his groin, trying to decide which one to see to first.

     Moroney came in and pointed at Tin. "Keep that bastard alive," he said. "He shot 'em."

     Tucker motioned for the stretcher bearers to get Tin onto the operating table; the other wounded were laid on benches behind the partition.

     "What?" Tucker asked. "What happened?"

     "I donno yet, exactly. But there were no VC. He shot 'em." Moroney pointed again at Tin. "That's why I want him alive. I want to talk to him."

     The team's second medic was seeing to the three other wounded in the adjoining room, and was being helped by a couple of Montagnard boys who were still too young to fight but who had been taught to assist in the dispensary. I was the only man in the room who wasn't busy.

     "Does this sort of thing make you nervous, or can you give me a hand?" Tucker asked. Tin was writhing and groaning and tearing the IV needle out of his arm; he smelled of mud and blood and fear‑sweat, which has a much stronger and more acrid smell than sweat that comes with exertion. I recognized it from having smelled it on myself many times during my own Vietnam tour.

     Tin was hard to handle; his fear made him strong. I cut his clothes off and we lashed him to the operating table with thick hemp rope. Then we had to lash his arms down too to keep him from tearing the needle out, and when Tucker finally got some sulfa powder and a dressing of sorts on the messy part of the head where the bullet had come out, a Montagnard boy and I took turns holding his head against the table so he wouldn't turn it sideways and tear off the dressing and the mangled tissue that protruded from the exit wound low on his left temple. I had to lean over him to hold his head; I saw the wound up close and felt his pulse thundering through his temple above the wound and saw his left eye, cocked crazily because the bullet had passed just behind it. When he shuddered, I wondered if it was like having ahold of an electric eel. The Montagnard boy looked at me across the shuddering Tin with eyes which were curious, but otherwise showed no emotion.

     "Any bets?" Tucker said aloud. "I bet he don't last till morning." He slapped Tin on the belly. "Fucker don't deserve it anyway," he said. "If the skipper wasn't so hot to talk to him, I'd pull the tube on him right now."

     I went back to the dispensary to help with the stretchers when the medevac choppers came. It was dark, moonless. A Huey sat down on the airstrip just beyond the gate, but kept its rotors going at full power in case we were attacked and a quick liftoff was necessary. The gunship escort clattered about in the nearby night sky. The only points of light in our universe were the blinking red tail‑rotor lights on the choppers and one blinding white floodlight on the parapet which shone straight down in front of the gate.

     The rotors whack‑whacked and the red lights blinked and the white light blinded and the dust from the rotor wash swirled and the engines roared and men shouted in four languages, and we ran through that gumbo of sight and sound with the stretchers.

     I was carrying one end of Tin's stretcher. A group of angry Montagnards were waiting for us at the gate, but Moroney and some other Americans were there too and held them back as we ran through. As we were sliding Tin aboard the chopper, one of the Montagnards broke away and came running toward us waving his carbine.

     The little soldier was enraged. "Why you med'vac Tin? Tin kill CIDG! I KILL TIN!" Two Special Forces men put their bodies between him and us and disarmed him, as gently as they could manage in the face of his rage. Now I knew why they wanted me to help with the stretcher: they needed every one of their own to deal with the angry Montagnards.

     The choppers took off and we turned back to the team house; Moroney stayed to cool off the montagnards. "We should've given 'im to 'em," somebody spoke into the darkness.

     The story was pieced together: the squad had settled down for the night, and they had all lain down in the trail to sleep, leaving Tin on watch.

     It had not been long since the Montagnards did their fighting with spears and crossbows; they still did not understand something which any infantryman in a modern army is taught from the beginning: the closer together you are, the better target you present for automatic weapons fire, or for grenades or any other fragmentation device.

     That night, the members of the squad on patrol were huddled together on the trail, asleep in the illusion that their closeness gave them security, when Tin, who was on watch, for no reason that anyone could ever find out, raised his carbine and fired a long burst on full automatic, starting at one edge of the huddled sleepers and moving to the other. That burst killed one man and wounded four others; the man with the bullet through his groin also died later.

     The soldier Moroney was questioning in the operations room had wakened just as Tin started to fire, and had squeezed off one quick burst at Tin. It was one of those bullets which caught him under the chin and passed behind his left eye and out his left temple.

     "How you shoot?" Moroney was asking. "You shoot t‑t‑t‑t‑t... or you shoot pow, pow, one time, two time?"

     The soldier made as if to hold his weapon and imitated the way it would jump when fired on full automatic. "God damn it!" Moroney threw his pencil down and turned away. "I keep telling these people to learn to fire their weapons on semi‑automatic, but they never remember when they get scared. Makes 'em feel safe to throw out a lot of lead." He turned back to the soldier: "Well, okay, you can go now. But you stay here Mangbuk, so I can talk to you. Okay?"

     Later, in the team house, Moroney gave his instructions about how the incident was to be handled. Since Special Forces Headquarters at Kontum already knew there had been an exchange of fire, and since wounded CIDG soldiers would be showing up at the hospital there, a report would have to be made. Moroney did not want to lie and say that there had actually been contact with a VC force large enough to inflict five casualties, because then false information about the presence of enemy troops would be disseminated to other units in the area. But he had been warned about trusting Tin; he also feared outside meddling in a situation which he thought he could handle better himself. He decided that, after all, his official report would describe the incident as contact with a VC force, and instructed his men to keep quiet about it to outsiders.

     "Oh yeah, and where's that reporter?" he turned and pointed an admonitory finger at me. "I don't want one word printed about this, you hear? It would cause too much trouble; they wouldn't understand."    

     The next day, small brown soldiers buried one of Tin's victims in a small coffin made of plain raw lumber. Stapled to one end of the box was a sheet of 8-1/2" x 11" typing paper with a grease pencil epitaph:

                    NAME: KRIP

                    AGE: 18

                    NATION: MONT

                    LOCATION: MANGBUK

                    DATE DIED: 18 JUNE 68

     I stayed at Mangbuk two or three more days. The last I heard from the hospital was that Tin was still alive.

     Sometimes, even now, I think of Tin. I will think that he is probably still alive, because he has already lived through what should have killed him. Other times, I think he must be dead, because he had no place to go from the hospital but back to Mangbuk, where the Sedang were waiting to kill him; and if the Sedang didn't kill him, the VC would, because he left them for the other side; and if the VC didn't get him, the emphesema would, because his people didn't put smoke‑holes in the roofs of their huts.

                       

                                        Dream: Bodies of Water

I am a soldier again, but not in the Marine Corps this time. It's a more irregular force. We drop from higher ground toward a village. It is somewhat familiar; it may or may not be our village. It seems deserted, but we feel other presences. As we march wearily and warily down into the village, there is an inevitability to our marching, that feeling in the body which my dream has borrowed from my Adeste Fidelis march at Camp Pendleton years before. This inevitability is a property not just of our column of dusty, sweaty men. It is a property of the very movements of our limbs, of our muscles and bones, even of our cells. We might as well be insects hatching. The air is thick with risk. Is the village deserted, or are the people (our people? people loyal to the enemy?) hidden in the rude houses behind shuttered windows? Is the danger from them, or from someone else who will come? This land could be the rocky ridges of the West Bank, say an Israeli or Palestinian settlement or village near Jerusalem and Bethlehem; or it could be an open rocky area of the Guatemalan highlands, near where the road forks between Todos Santos Cuchumatán and San Miguel Acatán, only less green; or Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where Ollie North and his cowboys built their secret airstrip for the contras. A small creek, less than three feet wide, runs through the village. The banks of the creek are lined with stones placed by human hands. Some of us kneel to drink; some look warily around, rifles ready, up and downstream. Even we who drink are looking, peering out from under our eyebrows. As I drink, the creek floats a human body beneath my face, almost touching. The creek is barely wide enough for the body to pass. The body is a dark‑haired young man. The head, shoulders, hips, feet, all bump jerkily against the creek's rocky sides as the water carries it along. The body floats face up. His hands are bound behind his back. I look upstream. Another body, another dark‑haired young man, is close behind the first. As my eyes change focus and sweep upstream, I see the creek is filled with bodies of dark‑haired young men in civilian clothes, crowded head to foot, hands bound behind, bumping between narrow rocky creekbanks propelled by a stream of clear water. They clog, jam up, bump into one another like wastage from a doll factory. But the same inevitability which infuses our movements unsticks the bodies, moves them bumpily on downstream. I look farther upstream, lowering my face until it is just above the stream of bodies and clear water. I now can see under the stone-lined culvert from which the stream emerges. In the light that comes through the tunnel, I see legs of soldiers standing on the creekbanks beyond the culvert. They are wearing blue jeans, other civilian pants, boots, tennis shoes, the odd bit of uniform. I see only their legs, and the muzzles of their rifles at the ready. Their legs look like the legs of the bodies in the creek. They also look like our legs. Or they could be the legs of the players, seen through a broken horizontal slat in the fence around any inner-city basketball court in the world. Are they the killers? Are they coming for us? Are they reinforcements for us? Or are they a fresh supply of bodies for the water?   

PACKING

Packing

     It was the summer of 1967, between my sophomore and junior years. Dave Miller, an oboist friend who played for the Air Force Academy Band, had gotten me a job working with him installing underground lawn sprinklers in Colorado Springs with a man who called his company Modern Mole, because he had this little rig that we pulled behind a small tractor that sank a bullet‑shaped piece of steel below the sod and pulled the irrigation tubing along behind it under the sod, instead of having to dig a trench and replace the sod.

     One day Dave and I were having lunch in this one‑notch‑up‑from‑fast‑food place on Nevada Avenue. The dining area consisted of one big open room. Most of the tables were full. We were sitting at a table near one of the restaurant's three doors. I should say here that, although it was nearly a year after I'd left Vietnam, and those months on a bucolic private college campus that was as unlike Vietnam as I could imagine had begun to drain the habitual fear out of me, I still had my share of a combat veteran's instincts. (For that matter, even as I write this in 1992, I prefer to sit near a door in public places. Corners with a view of the whole room and all doors are best.)

     A man opened the door behind Dave and stepped inside, just out of the traffic, and stood there unobtrusively. That is, he was trying to be unobtrusive. He wouldn't have startled me more had he been wearing a clown suit and leading a rhinoceros on a sequined leash.

     He was tall, and had the combined thickness of limb and physical grace of a pro football running back. The picture rounded out: conservative business suit ‑ tailored, not off the rack ‑ and "high and tight" haircut. My eyes swept over him once; the slight bulge in his suit coat just above the right hip was more confirmation than surprise.

     His eyes scoured the room with an utterly amoral professionality. He was looking for someone who didn't want to be found. My brain scanned that information and prompted me to look at the other two doors. Again, more confirmation than surprise: each was filled by a clone of the man who stood behind Dave, including the bulge at the waist.

     "Hey, Dave, look! Those guys are all packin' guns!" I almost shouted. My voice carried across the room, splitting the hubbub of lunchtime conversation.

     Dave dropped his fork and looked at me with wide eyes. I pointed with my chin over his shoulder. He spun around, his nose almost bumping into the bulge at the man's hip. He spun back around. I pointed at the other two doors. At the instant of my remark, the three had made eye contact with one another across the room. The man behind Dave gave a slight twitch of his head, and they were gone.

     I looked around the room. Not a fork dropped, not a conversation was interrupted, not a head turned to notice the three armed men who had had the room sealed off, looking for someone among them.

ROGUE RIVER AND RATTLESNAKES

Eastern Oregon began to settle into my bones. I loved the higher altitude, the crisper air, the snow in winter instead of rain. I loved hunting rabbits and deer with Bill Gano in the open country east of Klamath Falls. There were even good trout-fishing streams.

But there was no Rogue River.

     I became nostalgic for the river. Jack Dunham and I had been friends in school before the summer of 1956 when Mom and Bill moved us to Klamath Falls. We were both skinny kids with glasses who didn’t have to study much, so we had time to prowl the hills and streams around Grants Pass like the couple of wild Indians we often imagined ourselves to be.     

     The Rogue River had flowed through our lives, a great presence at once mythical and real. When a heavy Spring rain would add its volume to that of the snowmelt from the Cascade Range, the Rogue would sometimes live up to its name and flood, suddenly and unpredictably, swatting homes and small motels from its banks with a casual power. But most of the time it glittered bright green and white over the rounded stones of its bed as it took sharp turns through the canyons on its way to slide into the Pacific at Gold Beach, or thundered over rapids into deep green pools where we'd swim and fish, with spinning rods and worms, for the rainbow trout we shared the river with, ignoring our elders' warnings about what a rogue the river truly was, and how many overconfident boys it had claimed.

     August was a special time on the river. A critical component of that specialness was, of course ‑ no school! The felt approach of September would concentrate the urgency of our adventures, the long warm evenings allowing us to stay out later. The lower water level let us sidle right up next to the river's heart. The pools where we and the trout tried to trick one another shrank until we could wade into the edges of the dark secret rooms where they lived.

     August air became hot and dry and still as it hung in the timbered canyons above the river, with western Oregon's rainy winter a doubtful memory as pickup-tossed dust rose in serpentine coils above the dirt roads that laced the woods along the riverbanks.

     Blackberries would ripen. Having stored moisture from a wetter time, they hung - lumpy, whiskered obsidian pendulums - along road‑ and trail‑sides. The sun would hit the berries and the dark green leaves that crowded out from the thorny red vines and the air would thicken with more than odor: walking there, you breathed an atmosphere of hot blackberries and dust and pine sap that was so close and right that it seemed that that mixture, rather than oxygen, was what your blood waited to extract from the air and turn into cells of muscle and bone.

     Sound would do its part along the Rogue in August. The near‑cessation of air movement through the canyons removed what had been, at other times of the year, a huge and constant presence: the low‑pitched but loud sibilance of the wind's passage through, and scraping together of, pine and hemlock and spruce and cedar needles, and the leaves of laurel, madrone, manzanita, chinquapin, chestnut, live oak.

     Maybe the sun stirred the insects to make their buggy music, or maybe they were doing what they always did, but now we could hear them better in the absence of that larger noise. In any case, an electric buzz settled above the river, in which raspy cricket calls provided a rhythmic warp onto which was woven the buzzes, whines, and drones of deerflies, black flies, mosquitoes, and gnats that crowded the still, dusty air.

     This electric buzzing air had another meaning along the Rogue: rattlesnake. Oddly, the received wisdom that we breathed in with the blackberry air had it that the snakes shed their skins in August, adding a new button to their rattles as they did so, and that late summer was the only time of year when rattlers couldn't be counted on to give their warning, as well as the time when they were out in greatest numbers. This made August the most dangerous time of the year, snake‑wise, along the river.

     Whether or not the Rogue's buzzing August atmosphere actually included rattlesnake shakes, the mixture of dust and still air and heat and insect noise along the river had the meaning, for us kids who grew up there, of rattlesnake air. That was just the way it was. But the blackberries were still there, the river was still there, the trout were still there, and September and school were approaching. So we had to go to the river in August, fishing till dusk in the deep green pools, then gathering baseball capfulls of dusty blackberries along the roadsides and returning to the river to wash our berries, clean our trout and feed their guts to their still‑swimming cannibal relatives, and eat the berries and drink cool water from one of the little creeks that flowed into the river and take a final swim in the evening light to rinse the dust from us. We'd trudge home with our freshly gutted trout strung on forks of willow branches we'd cut with our pocket knives.

     Tragedy struck: we began to grow up. Sports and girls and the awe‑inspiring world of junior high school pulled us back from the banks of the Rogue. During the summer after seventh grade ‑ 1956 ‑ Bill Gano had lost his job in a chrome mine just across the line in California, and the sawmills around Grants Pass weren't hiring. He and Mom had packed Darrell and me into the '53 Studebaker, stuffing it and a U‑Haul trailer with everything we owned, and set off looking for work. Where we found work was where we would live. Mom set a deadline of September 1st. We had to have found work by then, and had to have a place to live and have enough money for the first month's rent, so Darrell and I could start school with the other kids.             

     We made the rounds of small Oregon towns. My memory is of the dusty smell of hot velveteen seat covers, of Darrell and me squeezed into the back seat along with a pile of bedding; of Bill plodding the dust of sawmill yards, farms, ranches, and welding shops looking for work; and of Mom trying to get on at grocery stores or butcher shops as a checker or meat wrapper.

     In late August, we ended up in Klamath Falls, still with no work. Mom dropped the hammer: this is it, the boys will go to school here. We had enough money from part‑time work over the summer to get us in the door of the Shasta‑View Apartments (even small towns have low‑rent districts). Bill haunted the personnel office of the big Weyerhauser mill outside town, and finally got on there as a welder.

     Jack Dunham and I kept in touch through the eighth grade and the early years of high school. I'd write about hunting mule deer with Bill in the sagebrush, juniper, and rimrock country east of Klamath Falls; Jack would write about the river.

     We decided to get back to the river one more time before adulthood pried us loose from it. We would get together in August with a couple of Jack's friends, backpack down the Rogue from Galice to Illahe, then take the mailboats on downstream to Gold Beach where his folks would pick us up and drive us back to Grants Pass. Jack and I were both sixteen.

     I'd done the same trip years before as a Boy Scout; Jack, who had lived his whole life almost within walking distance of the river, never had. We put our heads together. Someone couldn't make it in early June because of a family vacation, and some of us had summer jobs through the rest of June and through July into August. But the four of us blocked out everything else for the last week in August: we would walk the river, do it right, and enter our junior years of high school as seasoned wilderness explorers.    

     We knew August wasn't the best time: we'd have to watch for snakes.

     It really was wilderness. The roads we'd used to approach the river as younger kids stopped at Galice, a few miles downstream from Grants Pass, at the beginning of a nearly 50‑mile stretch of river that was a legally designated wilderness area. This meant that no motor vehicles could enter the area. If you wanted to see this part of the river, you walked it, or rode a horse or mule, or were one of a few stalwart (and moneyed) souls who shot through the canyons in white‑water boats with professional guides.

     Jack's family had a friend at Galice, a hoary‑headed émigré who had fled the Bolshevik revolution. The story was that he'd lived as a child and young man on a river in Russia, and had settled on the Rogue to live out his years. We spent the night at his place before our "jump‑off;" Jack's two friends would join us early the next morning.

     The old man's cabin was on the inside curve of a big bend in the river, nestled on the bank just above the high‑water mark. The river went wide and shallow around the bend, making all the shades there are of green and silver and white as it riffled over the large stones it had rounded over the centuries. The afternoon we showed up, August's blackberry‑and‑rattlesnake air crowded around us, with sunlight slanting past barely moving leaves to aim dusty inclined shafts of light at the forest floor, leaving leaf‑shadows between them in a pattern so radically bright and dark that, just walking along, the pupils of our eyes would become confused about how much light to let in, so that we'd stumble over roots we'd easily have seen on a cloudy day.

     When Jack's folks dropped us off in mid‑afternoon, telling us to have a great time and be careful, we dropped our packs on the old man's porch and walked around with him as he showed off his place. The river’s noise – especially to me, who hadn't heard it, hadn't really listened to it, for three years ‑ seemed nothing more or less than a delightful, continuous roar of water flowing swiftly over its rocky bed.

     The old man lived off his Social Security check and his garden and fish from the river and venison in the fall. The garden grew in the rich silty soil the river deposited in its own bend during high-water times. Weedless rows of corn and green beans and radishes and lettuce were springy with life. Raspberry vines planted in the open to take advantage of daylong sun gave him a flavor to alternate with the fat blackberries he gathered from the roadside.

     Afternoon slanted into evening. The old man retreated to the interior of his cabin, built of a single vertical layer of weathered boards, and insulated inside with layers of newspaper long since gilded by time and light. His furniture was a big old easy chair, a small wooden table and a couple of stools, and a phonograph. He had a stack of classical records in scuffed jackets.

     A ritual began to be enacted, one of the most guilelessly reverent I have ever seen. As the newspapers on the wall began to glow with just enough of the day's last purple light to read by, the old man knelt and went carefully through his records. He read the labels as if we were not there, his inner ear hearing the choices he made. He settled on an inch‑thick stack of records, all he could fit on the spindle that would drop them, one at a time, onto the turntable.

     With records in place, with evening fading to night, he lit no lantern. Indicating with a wave of his hand that we were welcome to stay, he leaned back in his big chair, put his feet up, and closed his eyes. Jack and I sat quietly for a while, watching the old man inhabit his own world in his own way, and listening to music we'd never heard before, knowing that although it was strange to us, it was right for hearing with the sound of the river. I imagine now that he was playing Rachmaninoff, but I don't know that. Maybe it's just that in my life now, whenever I hear Rachmaninoff, I see that old man and his cabin and his Rogue.

     He'd set the volume so that when a symphony orchestra reached a louder part of the music, it would for a time drown out the sound of the river making its bend behind him. But when the music slipped into a quieter section, the river's chorus would return, would enter the old man's ears, and would, we thought, carry him back to the Russian river of his youth.

     We tried to listen as we imagined him to be listening. It came to me that the river's sound wasn't uniform at all. If you paid close attention, some unknown watery event upstream and back in time, like light arriving from a long‑dead star, would change the volume or speed of the water, it would strike the stones differently, the sound would wax and wane and break into colored pieces, an aural rainbow of splashes and gurgles and wet black and silver whispers.

     Two or three days later, a number of things had happened. We had cursed ourselves for bringing so much food that our packstraps cut into sweaty, salt‑rimed shoulders. Tennis shoe insoles had worn through where our toes dug into them from the extra weight and the gravitational acceleration of downhill slogging. We all had prize blisters. Our food ran low; now we cursed ourselves for bringing so little. The work of walking the trails from dawn to dusk had given us appetites we'd never dreamed possible.

     Fishing became more than fun: it was between us and hunger. We washed the salt and dust from our trail‑weary bodies by diving off boulders into deep green pools. We walked through birdless forest cathedrals, where boles of Ponderosa pine shot up, branchless for a hundred feet before they put out the canopy that all but blocked sunlight from the forest floor. We passed places with magic names, places Zane Grey had written about in Rogue River Feud, one of his many books about cowboys and mountain men and mountains and rivers and deserts that I had absorbed directly into my bloodstream: Horsehoe Bar, Rainie Falls, Black Bar.

     We stopped one thirsty afternoon at a miner's homestead cabin; he pulled a quart of home‑brewed beer out of a cold spring and shared it with us. It took our heads off: so cold, so good, so forbidden. We clowned our way off into the afternoon, acting drunker that we could possibly have gotten on a quart of beer split five ways.

     We were in Hell's canyon, where the Rogue narrowed between steep rock walls and pounded its way through, the steepened gradient hurling masses of water at and past the rocks with a violence that impressed four teenage boys, as no parental warning can, that we were in a place wild enough to kill us if we screwed up. Or even if we didn't.

     As we entered the canyon, we had a little talk. We didn't sound like kids anymore. We were impressed, even scared, by our situation. The nearest road or telephone was probably twenty miles away, in what direction was anybody's guess. A broken ankle would be a disaster of a high order; we discussed who would stay, who would go for help, in what direction, what to carry. And a snakebite here wouldn't be survived by making razor cuts on the bite, applying the Cutter's suction cups, and calling for help.

     The trail in this part of the canyon was a notch cut in the canyon wall, about halfway up. It was less than two feet wide in many places, with a sheer drop below ‑ often too high to survive, should one turn suddenly to talk to the guy behind him and be jostled off the trail by his pack hitting the rock face behind him ‑ and a sheer climb above. We'd seen lots of bear shit and tracks; they were coming down to the river to feed on fish and berries. If we met a bear or snake on this part of the trail, there was only one way to go, and that was backwards. Fast. And carefully.

     In our suddenly grown‑up conference, it was decided that I would lead down the trail into Hell's Canyon. I had the only real weapon, the .22 Ruger Single‑Six revolver my mom had helped me buy earlier that year, after my 16^th birthday. The wisdom absorbed from the older men in our families asserted itself. We agreed that it would be mighty stupid to shoot a bear with a .22 pistol, if the bear gave us any other choice. Someone said that black bears, the kind we had in that country, had thin skulls ‑ had seen such a skull ‑ the thinnest part being right over the center of the brain. If you have to shoot, shoot for that. If you see a bear, look for cubs, and for God's sake, don't get between a mother and her cubs.

     Afternoon. We were moving through the canyon, hot, tired, exhilarated, scared. We were all fantasizing wordlessly about cold sodas at Illahe, about did they have cheeseburgers there, about putting our feet up and letting the mail boats speed us to Gold Beach, about soaking our huge blisters in the salty Pacific.

     I heard something beside my ear. I stopped, turned, and looked a rattlesnake in the eyes, six inches away: yellow, round, unlidded, unblinking, with long dark vertical pupils slightly wider at the center of the eye and tapering to points at top and bottom. It seemed then, and seems to me now, that I exchanged stares with those eyes for a lifetime. They became, for the rest of my life, not a symbol (too real for that), but the incarnation of everything strange, dark, evil, dangerous.

     The cutting of the trail in the canyon wall had left the top of the cut, at this point, exactly at my eye level, and the snake had been sunning itself there. It didn't rattle; what I'd heard was its startled movement in the grass.     

     Things seemed to move in slow motion, but they told me later I'd moved way too fast. I'd nearly knocked all three of them off the trail with my frantic backstepping.     

     I did all this at once, they said. I yelled "RATTLESNAKE!" so loud it must still be echoing in the canyon; I jumped back, slamming my pack into the face of whoever was behind me, starting an unfunny Keystone Cops chain reaction among the four of us; and jerked out the Ruger and cocked it.

     The snake had moved as quickly. It had moved right at me, all but touching my face, dropping over the rock bank just under my chin, its head almost sliding down inside my shirt front, slithering down the five feet of cut rock to the trailbed where I'd been when I turned to look into its eyes, and started across the trail. Once it was stretched across the trail (it was about three feet long), it stopped, blocking our advance. I raised the pistol, sighted on the body of the snake, moved left along it to where its head must be in the clump of grass it had begun to enter. I had just had a nose-to-nose view of how a rattler's body is built, with the quick taper just behind the head. I couldn't see the head, but I saw the taper, so the head must be just here, where I'm aiming now. I remember to aim a little low, like Bill and my uncle Lank had taught me to do when shooting a pistol.     

     I squeezed. The pistol jumped. I don't remember hearing the shot, but it must have echoed in the canyon. The snake didn't move. I re‑cocked the pistol, pulled it back to the right where the thick part of its body rested just above my sights, and fired again. The part of the snake where the bullet hit twisted as the hollow point tore it almost in two, the exposed red flesh dropping back into the dust of the trail.

     We backed off a few yards and set our packs down. Somebody got me a stick. I walked slowly up to the snake, pistol in right hand, stick in left, and pulled the rest of the inert body back onto the trail. I poked at it until we were sure it was dead, then we got up close to look. The first bullet had torn most of the tissue out from the head; one fang dangled from the skin.

     August or no, the snake either hadn't yet shed its skin, was already wearing a new one, or had skipped the process in the year humans called 1959. Anyway, it had a fine rattle of about ten segments. I cut the rattle off and put it in a small wooden tube we carried some kind of medicine in. That night at our campfire, I held the fleshy part of the rattle against a hot ember, so it wouldn't rot and stink. There was a crackling sound as it cauterized; I snorted the smoke from it back out of my nostrils. Jokes about how they'd have had to put a tourniquet around my neck if the snake had bitten me in the nose sent our nervous, relieved laughter out over the lower reaches of Hell's Canyon.

WARTIME IS WONDERFUL

                                                 Wartime Is Wonderful

When we first occupied the section of the First Marine Division perimeter overlooking the Song Tra Bong River, we used to shit in a slit trench, which you'd straddle and squat over and do your business as fast as you could to minimize the number of big black flies that buzzed up your asshole. And we pissed in piss tubes: they were empty, olive drab, cylindrical steel powder canisters ‑ the ones from 155mm howitzers or 8" Long Tom self‑propelled guns were best ‑ with one end buried in the ground. We'd place them at a slight angle to the ground, with the top of the canister just below dick level. You just walked up, unbuttoned your fly, and pissed in it. As time went on, and the occasional Navy nurse or Red Cross "donut dolly" would pass by in an open jeep on the way to the Division CP, we were ordered to drive three tall stakes in the ground, forming an angle between the piss tube and the road, and stretch an old poncho around them at waist height. The road was too far away for the women to actually see our dicks (though some guys would argue that theirs were big enough to be seen from twice that distance). And since the piss tube and our boots were clearly visible between the poncho and the ground, the poncho wasn't concealing the activity. Modesty was a creation of the command structure. Some guys think that that kind of thinking was probably what lost us the war. Funny, but then war is funny. Funny as the rest of what we do.

     A couple of weeks before my tour was up, the troops' complaints to me, as senior corporal in the outfit, rose in frequency and volume: Couldn't we have a decent place to shit? Couldn't we have something with walls, something to keep out at least some of the flies, a little privacy for that private act? (Unspoken: a little privacy too for that more private act, the midnight sojourn with Playboy centerfold or girlfriend's snapshot).

     I took the complaints to our skipper, a fat ineffectual lifer captain who'd been passed over for promotion to major so many times that only the war had saved him from being mustered out before he was eligible for a pension. He bounced it back to me in the Marine Corps way: ‑ Take charge, Corporal: form a detail, build a shitter. How? ‑ Figure it out. Take charge. From what? ‑ Find something. Figure it out. You're in charge. Take charge. Charge!

     Everybody knew that the Marine Corps had nothing but a lot of men (or, as the brass would have outsiders see it, A Few Good Men), some weapons, some ammo, a few vehicles, a lot of canvas gear our ancestors in the brotherhood carried ashore at places with now‑totemic names like Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima. Gear the U.S. Army had replaced with newer, lighter, quieter stuff: plastic canteens, nylon ponchos, canvas‑topped boots, fiber helmet liners.

     The Marine Corps had nothing. The Navy, on the other hand, had everything. They gorged the bowels of their great grey ships and brought everything a bush-weary warrior could dream of (except home): hot chow, movies, nurses, building materials.

     So we stole from the Navy.

     It's not that paperwork, and the legions of peculiar humans required to type and sort carbon copies and file and log, didn't come to Vietnam. There were more of them than there were of us. But that was one system, whose function was, as we saw it, to keep the lifers occupied and out of our hair. The other system was the rest of us, operating under the umbrella of, and with the blessing of, combat exigency.

     Wartime is wonderful that way. It cuts through the bullshit, the pettiness, the insufferable claptrap of everyday life (this is one of the most important reasons why we go to war), reducing one's choices to lean, clear alternatives. Success rules. You pull it off, you don't have to explain. You fuck up, and you fall back into the bureaucratic morass.

     Our detachment was down the red dirt road from the 1st MarDiv command post. The Navy's Construction Battalion (Seabee) unit that supported the division was in that command post. They'd have what we needed. It would have to be a "midnight requisition," of course. But we wouldn't start that way. Too inefficient. I made a list of what we needed ‑ 2x4's; plywood if we could get it, planking if we couldn't; nails; some kind of roof covering ‑ including preferred sizes. I took a vehicle and one other man, and we drove over there one afternoon, parked a little ways from the Seabee compound, and walked up to the wire fence separating their materials dump from the rest of the CP.

     Most of their lumber was stacked pretty close to the fence, and the rest of it was close enough for us to evaluate. I pulled out my list and started checking things off. The sentry saw us, interrupted his circuit of the compound, and made his way halfheartedly in our direction. He wasn't stupid. It was his job to run us off, but since we weren't yet doing anything illegal, and weren’t on his side of the wire, all he could do was glower. Besides, he knew how things really worked, knew that one of the Seabees' real jobs was to haul in vastly more of everything than their own jobs required, so Marines could steal what we needed and go on making war with a minimum of paperwork. The office pogues had forms they could fill out and turn in so some staff officer somewhere up the line could make his numbers match.

     Time came for our midnight requisition. We had my sketch of the locations of what we needed, and a plan. Lights off, we backed the truck up to the wire, and three or four of us crawled under, leaving one man behind to load, and a second just inside the wire to slip the stuff under. The rest of us fanned out, each with a specific assignment: so many 2x4's from such and such a stack, and so forth. We were out of there in minutes with everything we needed, or a reasonable substitute.

     Hegel wrote ‑ I believe it was in the "Master and Slave" section of his Phenomenology of Spirit ‑ that the man who is forced by those who hold power over him to work on the world with his own hands has a more immediate relationship with the world than does the master, and therefore, paradoxically, has a more empowered position in life than does the master himself. As soon, that is, as he, the slave, understands the true nature of his activity. The slave doesn't need the master to work the land, because he knows how. But the opposite isn't true: the master needs the slave to accumulate wealth from the land, because he can’t do the work himself.

     I knew that then, though I didn't know Hegel had said it. I think that, in a way, every private soldier knows it, and every factory worker and farm hand and deck hand and seamstress and cook and waitress. Women especially know it, and people whose skin is not white, even though Hegel didn't spend any more words on any of those groups than did the founding fathers of our country.

     We made that knowledge work for us. It had to do with where we'd put the shitter. Militarily speaking, the officers would have been duty bound to locate it off in the brush behind the tents we lived in, and far below the ridgeline which went through our position and which was the tactical reason for our having been stuck there.

     But the captain didn't tell me where to put the shitter; he just said, "You're in charge, Corporal, get it done and don't bother me with details."

     "Well, guys," I says, "where do we want this fine new shitter we're gonna build?" We discussed military exigency, and we discussed our own social priorities, and we discussed beauty and convenience. Over the next few days, between radio watches and sentry duty, we built the shitter. We scraped the red dirt at four corners until the tops of four pyramidal concrete piers were level, and built a plank floor on them. The two end walls were trapezoidal, so the roof would slant enough to carry off the rain. The bottom half of the back wall was hinged, so the halves of 55‑gallon diesel drums ‑ four of them, one under each hole ‑ could be pulled out and their contents doused with diesel fuel every few days and lit up to produce the bilious clouds of black smoke and the stench that, to this day, clings to the nostril hairs of every Vietnam veteran. (Scholars, please see Bruce Weigl's excellent poem, "Burning Shit at An Khe".) We ruined all manner of saw blades trying to cut the steel drums in half, before we went at them with an ax, driving it blow by blow through the steel with a sledge hammer, taking turns with the relentless sweaty pounding until the two drums were cut into four jagged‑topped halves.

     The front had ‑ get this ‑ an actual door, steel hinges and all, that could be closed, and a coil spring to keep it closed.

     When I left the outfit a few days later, there it stood, our fine new four‑holer, right smack on the ridgeline, with a golf‑course quality view ‑ screened, of course ‑ of the Song Tra Bong River valley, where you could sit and shit in peace, read, beat your meat, or just enjoy the view. It was especially nice at sunrise. The breeze that came up the valley ventilated it as well as an outhouse can be ventilated. It was convenient to the enlisted men's tent, but quite a longer hike from the officers' tent. Xin loi, sorry 'bout that.

     A couple of months after I left, I got a letter from Martin Luther Ealy, who was still there at Chu Lai. He said that after I'd left, they'd had an official opening ceremony. The captain had cut the ribbon himself, thereby making his first contribution to the project.

     I still have Martin's letter. He was from New Orleans. He always told me to look him up there, after the war. I wonder if I could still find him. I wonder if he's alive. Martin, are you out there?

THE LAST NIGHTMARE

Dream: Dance of the Arrows

I'm standing alone in the center of a wide, barren plain that stretches to the horizon in every direction. The sky is clear, and sits like a hemispheric blue cap over the plain. I look at the horizon, follow it around. It is featureless... but wait: there is a solitary figure, a speck on the horizon. That figure and I are the only visual interruptions of the universe bounded by earth and sky. I'm invigorated by the feeling of spaciousness, but recognize that I must be watchful. Sure enough: the figure on the horizon is an archer. He draws a powerful bow. Alarm, my warrior's antennae say. The archer shoots an arrow into the sky. The arrow's trajectory says that it is perfectly aimed at me. The arrow disappears from sight, but I must track its flight. I do so by moving my head as though my initial observations had actually programmed the arrow's trajectory into my nervous system. I track the arrow forward, from the point where it disappears from sight in the sky until it reappears, a deadly dot in the blue, now on its way down to kill me. I jump around. I try to dodge it. But it never wavers: no matter how I move, I feel the tingle of its anticipated penetration just below my navel. The arrow swoops toward me, visually accelerating in the way I've seen machine-gun tracers appear to speed up as they come nearer, after having seemed to be moving quite slowly toward me as I observed them from a distance; or the way the ground swoops up toward a parachutist during the last seconds of fall. Just before the arrow hits me, I make one final, quick sidestep. The arrow's feathers brush my belly; it thunks into the earth. Alarm. I look up. Comes another. Again I am able to dodge it only at the last instant. Again the feathers brush my abdomen. Again the arrow stabs the ground at my feet. There is an infinite succession of them. I have figured out that the arrows, while seeming to remain perfectly aimed at my center, never waver in flight, no matter how I jump and dodge. This, I learn, is because the arrow simply knows where I will be when it arrives three and a half feet off the ground, and is aimed there. So my jumping about as the arrow descends is irrelevant. I learn that, with each shot, I am given one, and only one, chance to save my life. This is what Japanese martial artists call suki, or "opening": that tiny window in time ‑ often far less than a second ‑ when an opponent's attention is interrupted or distracted, when only an instinctive, forceful, and unhesitatingly intentional motion will be quick enough and sure enough to enter the opening. So I must watch each arrow as it leaps out of the sky to kill me, and I must wait. I must let it come. As the arrows continue to come and I tire from exertion and fear, I must force myself to relax so that in dodging one arrow I don't overexert and fail to recover in time for the next. Each time, I must wait, closing out the fear that tries like a pack of howling dogs to crowd my mind, to panic me. I must wait until the steel of the broadhead is about to puncture my belly. Then I must perfectly ‑ without protest, without excuses, without appeal to fairness or justice, without asking for help ‑ execute the one quick movement I'm allowed for dodging that arrow. Then I must forget that arrow, allowing no thought of relief or victory or pride in accomplishment, and be ready for the next. The arrows come in a perfect rhythm. So my side‑steps adopt the same rhythm, thereby becoming, of necessity, a dance. I'm never released from the mortal urgency of the situation, but it begins to strike me as funny. At the end of the dream, I'm still dodging the arrows, which never relent in accuracy or intention. But I'm laughing, as at something in a Chaplin movie, funny but urgent, as I dance my dance of survival.

                           The Last Nightmare

                                   

In my anger and confusion upon leaving Vietnam, I had promised myself to study the war, and the human condition, until I understood the workings of the monstrous situation I had just lived through. I even promised myself that I would fix it! (See earlier post “Danang,” in Archive).

     I have been engaged in that study since then, and this book is the result, so far. What I didn’t know when I made the promise was that the arc of that study would parallel the arc of the healing of my emotional wounds from the war (I was never hit by bullets or shrapnel, only narrowly missed). In fact, the arc of my personal healing was the SAME as the arc of my awareness. I began to feel the war moving from a place deep inside me to a place outside, where I could see it, and myself, for what it was – for what I was.

     I’m still angry, of course. (see posts “Townies,” “Hunger 3,” “Seminar,” 
“J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac,” in Archive)

     That’s how I moved from nightmares to laughter, or from nightmares with no relief to nightmares in which I would waken in a fit of laughter so physically intense it would hurt my gut.

     The “Rattlesnake Dream” was the pivot point in that process. In the dream, my own people were pleading with me to do their killing for them, and I was ready. I was good with weapons; I performed well in dangerous situations. But my conversation with the snake taught me the deep wrong in my warrior’s assignment from my people, as the baby boy I was holding at bayonet point had begun to teach me that April day in Tho An (see “Prologue,” in Archive).

     So I turned and walked away.

     María Patricia Fajardo Valbuena and I met on the internet in July, 2008. We were married in March, 2009, in the office of the alcalde in Cota, the town next to Chía, Colombia, where she was born and grew up.

     Before dawn one morning in 2009, my wife and I were still asleep in our apartment in Chía. I was sitting upright in the bed. She was behind me, shaking me, shouting in my ear: “Dean! Dean! Que está pasando contigo?!”( What’s happening to you?!)”

     I was shaking violently, still not awake. She thought I was having a heart attack.

     But I was laughing. I was laughing as violently as if I were having an epileptic seizure, shaking the entire bed. I was dreaming this:

 A group of rich old men have a mansion on a hill. The entire exterior is large plate glass windows. The old men stay inside, keeping company only with themselves.

But there is one other old man outside: I am scurrying about, laughing, placing large mirrors close to the mansion, one in front of each window. The old men inside see their own reflections in the mirrors, become horrified at the sight, and fire at their reflections with shotguns. Each time the old man outside places another mirror, the old men inside blast away, destroying another section of their own house. I, the old man outside, am having a high old time, placing the mirrors and cackling and howling with laughter as the rich old men destroy their own mansion.

  Finally, Patricia was able to waken me. She was terrified that something awful was happening. She was trying to get through to me, but couldn’t communicate.

     I woke up and fell back in the bed, still laughing, and told her the dream. We laughed together for a long time.

MAN AND PISTOL

                                    Man and Pistol

     One evening at Chu Lai I got off radio watch and went behind the tents to the little illegal club we'd built for ourselves. Every man there was drunk. Minutes after I'd leaned my elbow on the plank we used for a bar and popped open a can of beer, Sergeant Williams, who was standing about five feet from me, pulled out his .45 automatic pistol and worked the slide. It slammed home, steel on brass on steel.

     There was a sharp scuffling sound of bootsoles leaving rough lumber, then a collective oof of the breath being knocked out of everyone but Williams and me as they hit belly‑down on the shipping pallets we'd laid as a floor. Williams was so drunk he could barely stand. He waved the pistol, now loaded, cocked, and off safety, from side to side. Since I was standing directly in front of him, it was pointed mostly at me.

     Several things became jarringly clear to me. The first was that I was looking my own immediate violent death in the face. The second was that it was entirely up to me to resolve the situation, because I was the only sober person there. The third thing was that if I made a mistake about how to relate to Williams...see realization number one.

     I studied him as though my life depended on understanding him, since it did. He did not seem particularly angry; he did not seem about to shoot. At least, not on purpose or at anyone in particular. He was just a normally harmless guy with a loaded pistol and something to prove. He did seem to have so little physical control of himself that, since his finger was on the trigger and the safety was off, an accidental discharge was highly likely, especially if he were bumped. Or challenged.

     He seemed...well, lonely. He seemed to want attention. Military outfits are like all societies; they have their cliques, their insiders and outsiders. Williams was a sergeant, but no one respected him very much. He wasn't particularly good at his job, or brave, or funny. He didn't stand out in any way or have any special claim to anyone's loyalty. He didn't have any close friends. I remember one time when he tried to be friendly. He was sitting on the ground outside our tent, drinking with Martin Luther Ealy. Ealy was a laughing, generous man, a 250‑pound cook from New Orleans who was particularly proud of his black heritage. Sgt Williams draped his arm around Ealy's powerful shoulders and said, in all sincerity, "Y'know, Ealy, for a nigger, you're a pretty good guy." Ealy convulsed with sobs, having chosen that reaction instead of killing Williams.

     Suddenly Williams seemed at once dangerous and pathetic to me. This guy wants respect, I thought. He pulled his weapon because he couldn't get respect or attention any other way.

     I began to talk to him, with one elbow leaning on the bar in as casual a pose as I could manage, but with my nerves firing as if I had two fingers plugged into a wall socket. The pistol's muzzle was three or four feet from my gut. This was the M1911A1 .45 caliber semiautomatic, with which I’d qualified on the firing range, becoming familiar with its heavy recoil. I’d been told it leaves an exit wound the size of a man’s fist, by at least one man who had seen, or inflicted, such a wound.

     I asked him how things had been going, how things were back home. He began to talk a little, still waving the pistol, not all over the place, but just back and forth in front of him as he reeled, which meant mostly at me, since I was so close. His concentration, such as he had, was on the cigar stub he was puffing. When he mentioned something, I would ask his opinion about it. I was very respectful.

     I began to admire his pistol. My first tentative compliments seemed to please him, so I committed in that direction: "A very fine weapon, yessir, a very fine piece. You must take mighty good care of it. Can I see it?"

     He proudly handed me the pistol, muzzle still towards me. I slowly turned it to point at a spot on the floor where no one was lying, let the hammer down tenderly, slipped the magazine out, and cleared the chamber. There was a sucking sound of air re-entering lungs as Marines began scraping themselves off the pallets. 

29 PALMS

                                                        Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twenty‑four hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night.

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

                           

29 Palms

1. Ungentle

     I had midwatch, midnight to 0400, walking post around our 155mm howitzers in the battalion's gun park. "Twentynine Stumps," California. Desert, my ass: deserts were supposed to be hot. This place of sand and rock was cold, knuckle‑numbing fucking cold.

     I walked around and around the guns. My boots crunched the cold sand. For diversion I broke the ice on shallow puddles left from a recent winter rain. Toward the end of my watch, a new skin of ice would form where I had kicked the holes by the time I made the next pass. The hawk was out.

     The cold made the stars seem closer. They glittered, along with the frost crystals and the silvery steel barrels of the cannons, the galvanized metal of the quonset huts and the glass headlight lenses of the dark hulking trucks.

     And cold was clear. The air had nothing in it: no blowing clouds of gritty powder, as came in summer sandstorms; no billows of blue‑black diesel exhaust we'd kick up above the motor pool when we worked on our vehicles in the daytime.

     There was no one to talk to, no sound to hear except what I made. But seeing... the fierce clarity of the air seemed to demand everything around me to jump at my eyes. I stopped to look. What was around me ‑ the big guns, quiet now but pregnant with awful noise, the hulking unlovely trucks with their starkly utilitarian knobby tires ‑ seemed peculiarly visible in the cold clear air, seemed to be broadcasting a special silent demand to be seen, just now and just as they were, by me.

     I took off my right glove. The cold bit deeper, but for a moment I experienced the feeling more as sharp than cold. I touched things. I walked up to where the inclined barrel of a 155mm howitzer pointed off toward the low jagged ridge that formed the base's horizon to the east. The combined light of cold stars and cold moon and cold floodlight crept into the cannon's dark maw and disappeared.

     I reached up and put my bare fingers into the howitzer's mouth, just over six inches in diameter. The steel's deep cold bit my fingers. I looked at the steel ridges of the rifling that spiraled down into the barrel. The ridges were square and sharp.

     The canvas covering lashed over the cannon's breech was frozen stiff, rough to the touch. I kept touching cold rough things: the howitzer's tractor‑like tires, the steel wheels, the lug nuts big as a medium-sized dog’s paw, the sharply threaded studs onto which the nuts were tightened, the gun's two I‑beam ways that converged at the tow‑ring, the angular fenders of the trucks, the crude steel grates that guarded their headlights, the frozen ropes, the canvas, the chains. I touched my own uniform, my equipment: the hard angles of the grooves in my rifle's flash suppressor, the machined edges of its receiver and operating rod handle, the serrated windage and elevation knobs on either side of the rear sight, the grooved plastic canteen cap with its flat keeper chain, the rough web belt, the checkered bayonet handle with its machined slot for my rifle's bayonet lug, my canvas field jacket, more rough than warm; the webbed rifle sling that cut its groove into my shoulder, the inhospitable steel pot on my head. Snaps, buckles, zippers, eyelets, all with their clear signal of what was to come. My mind scanned the words I knew, feeling that one word, and one only, was trying to insinuate itself into a prominent position before me. It came: ungentle. I had, through the simple succession of my own choices from among life's options, landed myself in a situation where nothing soft or gentle or comfortable or comforting was to be found.

     I put my glove back on, slapped my hands together, and went back to walking my post.

2. Old Enough to Bleed

     It was Monday. In the squad bay of Headquarters Platoon, "K" Battery, 4th Battalion, 11th Marines, we were hashing over the weekend's liberty. This was about the time I remember a Pfc named Waymire coming back from his weekend announcing something really new, really big. There was this hot new group, four guys from England, played this great music, wore their hair clear down to here (putting his hand on his shirt collar). Called themselves the Beatles.

     "Beetles?!" we howled. "What a stupid fucking name! That’s just an ugly bug.”              "Naw," Waymire corrected. "Beatles, b-e-A-t-l-e-s. As in 'beat,' or 'beatnik,' get it?" He was feeling pretty smug with his knowledge of the latest hot civilian thing.                    Two of the guys, lance corporals, were buddies who went out together to San Bernardino or Riverside or one of the other towns that were within driving distance if you could get your hands on a car that worked. I was nineteen; they were a little older.

     They were talking about their girl friends, two girls who were both fourteen. Both had just said they'd finally gotten to fuck the girls. It had been touchy, with nervous parents not liking the age difference. The guys said they'd played it just right, being patient with both the parents and the girls themselves. They were embarrassed talking about it, too proud not to.    

     Someone made a crack about cradle robbing. One of the guys - the taller one, is all I remember - answered, "Hey. If they're old enough to bleed, they're old enough to butcher."

3. Footprints

     It was a weekend. I either didn't have off‑base liberty, or didn't have any money. I decided to go for a hike in the desert that stretched out behind the barracks to the ridge and beyond.

     Some of the guys wondered at that... Jesus Christ man, there's nothin' out there, it's like the dark side of the moon, you could get lost and never found, it’s just artillery range, you could set off an unexploded round and be found in pieces. Still, somebody offered to go along, one of the others trapped like I was by rules or by the fact that last payday was long gone and it would be a while before "the eagle shit" again.

     I wanted to go alone. I've always had moments like that, when I've needed to separate myself from those around me, to go off and listen to my own voice and to the voice of the world and to a conversation between those two voices without the presence of everyday loyalties and concerns.

     There was no trail; I just plodded through the sand toward the rocky ridge that made a jagged dark‑blue line against the crystalline blue of the sky to the East. It wasn't quite summer, so it was hot but without that killing heat that would soon come. (Later that summer, we had a week when the temperature hit 125 degrees every day, when you were conscious of sweating but never felt moisture because it dried so fast, when walking outside made your utilities feel like when you were a kid and your mom had just finished ironing your jeans and you put them on fresh off the ironing board and they burned your legs.) I had my cartridge belt with two canteens, and a couple of candy bars. I'd be okay as long as I kept my bearings, which I'd grown up doing, though not in country like this.

     Approaching the ridge, then crossing it, didn't seem as dramatic as it should have been. I just kept walking, and the terrain gradually changed, the ridge looking bigger as the omnipresent sun signaled midday, then receded into a blue shape that looked much like it did from the base on its other side. The land beyond the ridge may or may not have been very different from the land where the base's buildings, which I now imagine would have appeared as rows of Monopoly real‑estate assets if viewed from the air, were laid out in rectilinear rows. It seemed that, perhaps less for its total lack of human constructions than for the fact that without buildings to look at, and without the skull‑occupying concerns that went with those buildings, I was now forced to look at the land itself, and not at the next street corner, the movie marquee, the shaved brown legs and halter tops of the officers' wives and daughters as they walked in and out of the PX.

     The land beyond the ridge was just big and empty. Vegetation was low, sparse: struggling to get enough water and not too much sunlight. Arroyos etched by flash floods lent occasional textural relief, but in the picture now bounded by my horizons, plant life and geological features dissolved into the vastness.

     I walked and walked, keeping the ridge at my back. Sometime in the afternoon I stopped to drink from my second canteen, and to look around. There was nothing but the sameness of the desert, the empty sunblasted distance capped by a skyfull of sun. I continued my slow turning, then pulled the canteen away in mid‑swallow. I must have been standing on a slight rise, though I hadn't noticed climbing one, still hadn't noticed any significant change in the empty landscape. I saw, off near the western horizon, a lone set of human footprints. They startled me, both by their mere existence and by the fact that I could see them from so far away. I speculated that the angle of the sun must have been low enough to cast a shadow into each footprint, making them visible against the bright sand for a long way.

     What wandering fool, what lonely soul, had been walking there? I let my eye follow the prints: slowly, slowly... as my gaze followed the meandering trail closer to where I was standing, I saw that it was heading in my direction. I followed, as if in dream, the approach of the prints to my hillock, looked down, and was adrenaline‑jolted into the realization that the footprints, the only visual interruption of the desert's emptiness, were mine. I was quite startled when I looked down at my boots and saw them standing in the final pair of prints.

     It was one of the most naked feelings I've ever had. I turned again, looking in the direction I'd been headed, half hoping that the trail would continue there so I'd have something to follow. But no: as much of the world as I could see was emptiness, and I was but a speck in it. I had arrived at no particular place, and with no signal by which to continue.

     I was chastened, even scared. I turned and followed my tracks back to the base, walking faster than I had on the way out.