from the chapter ALMOST A COWBOY

     After a field was mowed, the freshcut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two and a half foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again. 

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done. 

BANNING

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."

                            

A SHORT AMERICAN STORY

http://rattlesnakedreams.blogspot.com  A SHORT AMERICAN STORY

Samaritan in Los Angeles
     At the beginning of summer, 1970, I was hitchhiking through Los Angeles to drop in at Mike Taylor's wedding, then head for Mexico for a summer of reading John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, then hitchhiking to as many of the locations mentioned in the book as I could get to. I'd just finished my first year in graduate school, was startled to find I had a little money left over from my first year scholarship, and figured if I was really thrifty I could survive a summer in Mexico without working.
     It was rush hour and I was stranded on some little traffic island in the midst of what seemed like an intersection of all the freeways in California. I couldn't even see a way to cross a street without getting hit, and didn't know which street to cross if I could.
     A pickup swerved out of traffic and bumped onto the curb. "Git in..." the driver yelled. I did. "... 'fore we both git run over!" he said as he rammed the pickup back into traffic. He turned to me, grinning: "Are you as lost as I think you are?" I said I sure was. I told him where I was trying to go, and he drove me to a less frantic street and told me where to catch a ride.
     I thanked him for bailing me out of a difficult situation, and for going out of his way to do it. I climbed down and retrieved my knapsack from the floorboard. As I bent to pick it up, I noticed the muzzle of a .22 rifle just sticking out from under the seat on the passenger side. I looked up at him, trying to formulate a question about what there was to hunt in urban Los Angeles.
     "That's my nigger gitter," he said, his smile as friendly as before.
     I didn't know what to say. I'd just had my faith in humanity sent to both ends of the spectrum, in a couple of minutes, by the same man.
     "Git many?" I asked. I actually wanted to know if he used the .22 to shoot at black people, but now I think it came out like we were two country boys talking about hunting cottontails.
     He shook his head, still grinning. "Nah." He drove off.

La Violencia + Dream

From the chapter “Guatemala: La Violencia”

Our idea was to use Roger’s contacts and familiarity with the country to introduce me to people who had stories to tell about the history of systematic killing and repression, particularly under General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Roman Catholic-cum-Evangelical minister-cum de facto President and trusted friend of, and recipient of military aid and public praise from, U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Roger had friends in San Cristobal de las Casas, a lovely Mexican town in the state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. We stayed there for a couple of days, then went off the beaten path to a smaller town – I think it was Las Margaritas - nearer the border, and eventually to a small cluster of thatched makeshift homes of Guatemalan Mayan refugees who had managed to escape across the border during la violencia.

Roger now asked in the refugee camp for a specific Mayan man, by name. After a few minutes’ wait, a man appeared and approached us cautiously. Roger introduced us and we sat on stools in one of the huts.

He had a photo, several years old, of himself with a Guatemalan Mayan man. By itself, it meant nothing. But both men were readily identifiable, and Roger’s friend, the other man in the photo, had written a note about Roger on the back, and signed it. Roger handed the photo to this man, and sat quietly. The man looked at the photo for a long time. Then he turned it over and read the note on the back for a long time. Then he turned it back over and looked at the picture, again, for a long time. Then he looked up at Roger. His nod was the acknowledgement: I see that you are a friend of someone I trust. His face was now a question: what do you want?

Roger introduced me again, this time into a human situation that was categorically different from what it had been a few minutes before. He said that I could be trusted. He said I was a writer, a journalist who could get stories published about things that had happened in Indian towns in Guatemala. I could be trusted to name no names, to tell no details, that would endanger the life of the teller of a story, but that I could still tell the story to people in the United States, the same people who elected the presidents who were instrumental in giving military aid to Guatemala. The rest went unsaid; didn’t need to be said. It would have been like telling an Iowa farmer that too much rain at the wrong time might damage his corn crop.

The man was quiet. His head was bowed. He was sad. His sadness filled the hut. His sadness made us quiet, made us parishioners in the church of his sadness. He took a deep breath, let it out, spoke:

The soldiers came to our village. They gathered the young men who were there at the time. They tied their hands behind. They lined them up in front of the rest of us, their families. They painted them, their hair, their faces, all over, with gasoline.

Then they lit them...

Some of them we could only identify by their belt buckles....

I have seen – we all have seen, those of us who have been so lucky as to have a few decades of life behind us – a number of American presidents, speaking with utmost sincerity, on national television, appealing to us to believe their explanations of things, of what was happening to all of us, of what must be done in the face of these events.

I have never seen, on the face of any one of those presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - anything that made me believe he was telling the truth as that Mayan man in an unofficial refugee camp near the Guatemalan border made me believe that he was telling the truth.

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 creek banks 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 creek banks 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?  

  

A VETERAN'S DREAMS

Earlier readers of this blog may remember some of my later dreams, like “Dance of the Arrows” and “The Last Nightmare,” that still flirted with fear and danger, but essentially ended with a sort of redemption.

    

     The two dreams here, along with their short introduction, introduce dreams into the overall narrative of the book. They are not nice. But because Rattlesnake Dreams is not just about war – it is that – but about LEARNING ABOUT WAR, these dreams give a glimpse of how far I had to travel, emotionally and spiritually, to move from terror to laughter.

Interlude: A Veteran's Dreams

     Every veteran of ground combat has his own set of these dreams, usually for the rest of his life. Some are nightmares that are so horrible that they launch the dreamer bodily out of sleep, then clamp his mind shut, in forgetfulness, against what he just saw. Often only fragments remain. Or a dream will be repeated so often that it can't be forgotten. Sometimes, as with my dream about the wolves, it sears the brain so deeply, that one time, that it can't be forgotten.

     Since the war, my dreams have included an ongoing series of pursuit nightmares. Over the years, two things happened. I got weary of, and angry at, waking up terrified. I also realized that however scary the dreams were, they were also amazing pictures (in full color) and stories. I decided that if I had to put up with them, I should at least get some use out of them.

     I made a conscious decision to try, when I was having a nightmare in which I was being pursued, to do two things: to turn, in the dream, and confront my pursuers; and to remember the dreams instead of forgetting them. After all, I was a storyteller, and I was missing out on the use of material which was among my strongest, and for which I had paid the highest price. I began to write them down. The dreams related here are told exactly as they occurred to me, except that some have been shortened either by me or by that great editor, forgetfulness.

     In more recent years, my dreams – well, some, anyway - have become friends, except for the rare visitation of a nightmare as graphic and terrifying as the first two presented here. Along the way I learned an interesting thing: that while dreams inhabit the most fearsome recesses of the human soul, dreams themselves are brutally unafraid. They will go anywhere, reveling in deepest fears and unmentionable desires. Allowed to travel unfettered and then to haul their stories into the light of morning, they will do work - especially for a writer - which simply cannot be done by the awake mind.

         Dream: Nazi Pursuit

I am alone. A battalion of Nazi SS troopers are after me. They are focused entirely on finding and killing me. They are all big, strong men, definitely not parade‑ground troops. Their uniforms are dirty. They march with the cadence of our Adeste Fidelis column at Camp Pendleton, sweating as they march. All are armed with fully automatic weapons: submachine guns and heavier. Everything about them says: fit, experienced combat men. We are in a town that has been shot up in earlier fighting. They are near. They know the area; I do not. They spread out, searching expertly. I scurry like a rat. I duck into a dark place under a raised sidewalk, like the one I looked under in Cho Lon at the corpse of the Chinese woman. I clutch my rifle, which is a single‑shot .22 like the one I hunted rabbits with as a kid. I have one or two .22 cartridges to go against the SS battalion. Their big black boots are close enough to touch as they march past my face.

                                        Dream: Money Man Pursuit

A man, one man, is after me. He's decided I'm between him and what he wants. It has nothing to do with me personally, with who I am or with anything I've done. I try to dissuade him, but he won't listen. Only my death will clear his way. There is a long pursuit. Part of it is over the rooftops of the human community. I do good tricks to get away but he always picks up the trail again. I go through a library with all human knowledge in it, in such a way as to leave all that knowledge in the form of impediments for him. But he comes through it all, picks up my trail. Along the way, some people try to help me, but can't. Others are afraid to try. He has an AK47 which he fires at me whenever he comes within range, barely missing me. I hear the bullets snapping around my head like the bullets snapped near the well in Tho An in 1966. I meet a friend, a fellow combat vet. He says, "Remember that time...?" and recounts my telling him of our shelling and bombing a battlefield after a firefight until nothing recognizable was left but mud blasted into tortured shapes. My friend connects that story to the pursuit I'm now enduring, but I don't know why, unless just for its implacability, its inevitable movement in the direction of death. He says he'll be a lot more reluctant now, after a battle, to do his usual job of walking the ground and looking for survivors and for evidence of what happened there. I'm weary of dreaming this dream. I know I can't escape this man who pursues me. I know he'll kill me if I don't kill him. I lie in wait. I get up close. Fear and strength struggle in my body. The fear and the strength stop fighting, come to an agreement. The only way out is for me to become a more focused killer than he is. I become that. He comes. His eyes are maniacal, yet more cold than wild. Methodical. I now have a pistol. I aim carefully. A good head shot takes out one eye, goes into his brain. He keeps coming. I shoot again, take out the other eye. He will not die. I shoot and shoot, all brain shots. I'm aware of a wonderful, terrible ability to focus, like when I shot the rattlesnake on the Rogue River, or like standing in the open under fire at Tho An. This focus allows me to compartmentalize my being, putting my revulsion at killing off in a corner with my fear of death and the physical distractions of my environment and of my pursuer's movements. His head recoils crazily with each shot. Still he comes; he won't get it through his head. I grab a short sharp stick. Bullets are not enough; it has to be more personal. I thrust, put all my body's strength behind it, with the butt of the stick against my palm, and drive the point into one bloody eye socket, through his head, out the back of his skull. He finally gets the point. He dies, but not before he gets what he came for. We are in a fast food joint, behind the counter. Dying, he falls toward the cash register, grabs a wad of greenbacks the size of a large man's fist, too large to swallow, but rams it into his mouth anyway, his face a swamp of gore as he falls dead, still trying to swallow the money.

DREAM: RATTLESNAKE AND PISTOL

This dream is the title piece for the book, which will be 400+ pages of stories from Vietnam and the other wars I’ve seen. It’s also what I asked my friend Cruz Ortiz Zamarron to represent graphically. Now that he’s done that, I thought it might be a good idea to put the two close together.

     The book has a number of dreams, mostly post-combat nightmares. The rattlesnake dream was a nightmare that turned a corner in my life, a playing out of the change in me that began with holding the baby boy at bayonet point in the burning village of Tho An in April, 1966. (see Prologue)

     This book is the history of that change. We might call the dream the acorn from which it grew.

Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol

People come running up to me: people I know, friends, family, the human community. They're all afraid. They scurry and bump into one another in their urgency to summon my help: "Dean! Dean! There's a snake... you have to shoot it. Hurry!" I follow them. They form a wary circle around the snake, a rattler with powerfully writhing body as thick as my forearms, and triangular head the size of a fist. I'm in the circle, between the people and the snake. Someone hands me a pistol. It's a Hi Standard .22 semiautomatic with a 5" barrel. I recognize it in the dream, and later when I waken, as the first real pistol I ever held, the one my step‑dad Bill Gano taught me how to shoot when I was a kid, setting up bottlecaps on a log to represent snakes' heads. The pistol is totally familiar: the purposeful weightiness, the dully glinting, no‑nonsense machined surfaces, the knurled metal grips, the thumb safety and the blade front sight and the notch rear sight at the rear of the slide, even the screws, all as I remember them, in their proper places. The people become more frightened, their urgings more frantic: Hurry, they say, and shoot the snake. You're the only one who can do it. The snake throws its body into a coil of scaly, muscular loops. It cocks its head. It emanates power. The people surge back, their entreaties swelling to an ever higher pitch. I take the pistol and look down at the snake. It's in position to strike, but something is missing, which I notice more viscerally than visually. What is missing is that last critical increment of muscular readiness, the quiver of surgical tubing under tension. As I look closer, I notice that the head, instead of hovering just above the coils, tracking its target in readiness to strike, is still resting on the topmost coil, in a physical attitude which suggests both threat and a certain reluctance. And the mouth, which, if open to strike, would have been a terrifying maw in a snake that size, is still closed. I remember that a rattlesnake ready to strike flares its jaws open to almost 180 degrees in order to point all four fangs at its target. And this snake's eyes are not the cold, unblinking eyes with vertical black pupils I had stared into from six inches away, on the Rogue River, as a teenage boy. They are much larger, softer, moist, and brown, more like a dog's, or even a human's, eyes. The snake looks back at me. Its eyes convey ferocity layered with a deep wisdom; and with more layers of warmth, menace, accusation, resignation, regret, and a slight admixture of pleading. Though the snake does not have a voice, what it says with its eyes reaches my brain, not in words exactly, but still in a form akin to language. Ah, the snake says with its eyes. I guess you have to shoot me. I am, after all, a snake. And yes, I am dangerous. I wish I could promise never to bite any of these people, but I can't. I am what I am. But I'm not that different from you. And if you kill me, what does that make you? The urgings of the people in the circle around the snake and me have become a cacophony. They're aware of the eye‑to‑eye conversation between me and the snake, and want me to shoot before I have time to think about it. The snake is lying in its coils, its eyes now conveying only sadness and a deep reserve of dignity that says it will not demean itself by trying to avoid its fate. I reach down, pick up the snake, and put it in a burlap bag. I leave the circle. The people howl in surprise and protest, but express relief that the snake is no longer free among them. I walk down a road that leads away from the circle of the snake's accusers - the circle of my people - with the rattlesnake in the bag in my left hand, and the pistol, still loaded and still unfired, in my right. 

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?