I moved deeper into the gloom and sat with my back to the honden, the symmetrical, tile-roofed structure that housed the god of this small shrine. I closed my eyes and exhaled, long and complete, then listened, for a while, to the stillness.
When I was a boy I’d gotten caught stealing a chocolate bar from a neighborhood store. The elderly couple that owned the place knew me, of course, and informed my parents. I was terrified of my father’s reaction, and denied everything when he questioned me. He didn’t get angry. He nodded slowly instead, and told me that the most important thing for a man was to acknowledge what he has done, that if he fails to do so he can only be a coward. Did I understand that? he had asked.
At the time, I didn’t really grasp what he meant. But his words induced a burning shame, and I confessed. He took me to the store, where I offered a tearful apology. In the presence of the owners, his visage had been stern, almost wrathful. But as we left, while I continued to weep in my disgrace, he had briefly and awkwardly pulled me to his side, then gently laid his hand on my neck while we walked.
I’ve never forgotten what he told me. I know what I’ve done, and I acknowledge all of it.
My first personal kill was of a Viet Cong near the Xe Kong River, the Laotian border. In Vietnam it was called a “personal kill” when you killed a specific individual with a direct-fire weapon and were certain of having done it yourself. I was seventeen at the time.
I was part of a three-man recon team. The teams were small, and depended for success and survival on their ability to operate undetected behind enemy lines. So only men with the ability to move with absolute stealth were selected for recon. The missions required ghosts more than they required killers.
It happened at daybreak. I remember the way I could just make out the mist rising off the wet ground as light crept into the sky. I always thought it was a beautiful country. A lot of soldiers hated it because they hated having to be there, but I didn’t feel that way.
We’d been in the field for two nights with no contact and were heading to the extract point when we saw this guy, alone, standing in a clearing. We froze and watched him from just inside the tree line. He was carrying an AK, so we knew he was VC. He was pacing, looking left, then right. He seemed to be trying to orient himself. I remember wondering whether maybe he’d gotten separated from his unit. He looked a little scared.
Our guidelines were to avoid contact, but our mandate was to collect intelligence, and we saw that he was carrying a large book. Some kind of ledger. It might be a nice prize. We looked at each other. The team leader nodded at me.
I knelt and brought up my CAR-15, finding the VC in the sights, waiting for a pause in the pacing.
A few seconds passed. I knew I had time and wanted to be sure of the shot.
He knelt and set down his rifle and the book. Then he stood, opened his pants, and pissed. Steam rose from where the hot liquid hit the earth. I kept him in my sights, thinking the whole time that he had no idea what was coming and that this was a fucked-up way to die.
I let him finish and get himself back in his pants. Then, ka-pop! I dropped him. I saw him go down. I had this feeling of incredible elation, that I’d succeeded! I’d won! I was good at this!
We went over to where he lay. When we got there, I was surprised to see he was still alive. I’d hit him in the sternum and he had a sucking chest wound. He’d fallen on his back and his legs were splayed out. The ground underneath him was already dark with his blood.
I remember being struck by how young he was. He looked my age. I remember that thought shooting through my mind-God, same as me!-as we stood in a circle around him, not knowing what to do.
He was blinking rapidly, his eyes jumping from one face to another and then back again. They stopped on mine, and I thought it was because he knew I was the one who shot him. Later, I realized the explanation was likely more prosaic. He was probably just trying to make sense of my Asian features.
Someone undid a canteen and extended it to him. But he made no move to take it. His breathing became faster and shallower. Tears spilled out of the corners of his eyes and he mumbled words in a high, strained voice that none of us could understand. I learned later that battlefield wounded and dying often call out to their mothers. He might have been doing that.
We watched him. The chest wound stopped sucking. The blinking stopped, too. His head settled into the wet ground at an odd angle, as though he was listening to something.
We stood around him silently. The initial sense of elation was gone, replaced with a weirdly intimate tenderness, and a horrified sadness so sudden and heavy that it actually made me groan.
Same as me, I thought again. He didn’t look like a bad guy. I knew that in some other universe we wouldn’t have been trying to kill each other. Maybe we would have been friends. He wouldn’t be lying dead on a jungle floor saturated with his own blood.
One of the men I was with started to cry. The other began moaning Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, over and over again. Both of them vomited.
I did not.
We took the ledger. It turned out to contain some fairly useful information about VC payments to local village heads and other attempts to buy influence. Although of course, in the end, none of that had mattered.
Someone on the Huey that picked us up afterward laughed and told me I’d popped my cherry. No one talked about how it really felt, or what had happened while we stood in a silent circle and watched the man die.
When the army was assessing my suitability for the joint Special Forces-CIA program known as SOG, the psychiatrist had displayed a keen interest in that initial killing experience. He seemed to think it was noteworthy that I hadn’t vomited. And that what he described as my “associated negative emotions” had dissipated. No bad dreams afterward, that was also considered a plus.
Later, I learned that I was categorized as belonging to a magical two percent of military men who are capable of killing repeatedly, without hesitation, without special conditioning, without regret. I don’t know if I really belonged there. It wasn’t as easy for me as it was for Crazy Jake. But that’s where they put me.
The average person is surprised at the extent to which a soldier has to deal with hesitation before the fact and regret afterward. Of course, the average person has never been required to kill a stranger at close range.
Men who have survived close-quarters killing know that humans are possessed of a deep-seated, innate reluctance to kill their own species. I believe there are evolutionary explanations for the existence of this reluctance, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the fundamental purpose of basic training for most soldiers is to employ classical and operant conditioning techniques to suppress the reluctance. I know that modern training accomplishes this objective with ruthless effectiveness. I also know that the training deals better with the reluctance than it does with the regret.
I sat for a long time, picking through memories. Eventually I started to get cold. I went back to the hotel, watching my back as always along the way. I took an excruciatingly hot bath, then slipped into one of the cotton yukata the hotel had thoughtfully provided. I pulled a chair in front of the window and sat in the dark, watching the traffic moving along Hibiya-dori, twenty floors below. I thought of Midori. I wondered what she might be doing at that very instant on the other side of the world.
When the traffic began to thin, I got in bed. Sleep came slowly. I dreamed of Rio. It felt far away.