Why cling to the rules of engagement, to honorable behavior, to civilized limits; when the enemy so clearly doesn’t? Why hide behind the discipline of being a soldier, when the enemy is willing to do anything, anything at all, to win? Why struggle to stay a man, when it’s so much easier to just let go, and be just another beast in the jungle?
Because if you can hang on long enough…you get to go home. Being sent to Viet Nam is like being thrown down into Hell, while knowing all the time that Heaven is just a short flight away. But even Heaven and Hell can get strangely mixed up, in a distant place like this. There are pleasures and satisfactions to be found in Hell, that are never even dreamed of in Heaven. And after a while, you have to wonder if the person you’ve become can ever go home. Can ever go back, to the person he was.
Monsters don’t just happen. We make them, day by day, choice by choice.
I was waiting for my court-martial, and they were taking their own sweet time about it. I knew they were planning something special for me. The first clue came when they put me up in this rat-infested hotel, rather than the cell where I belonged. The door wasn’t even locked. After all, where could I go? I was famous now. Everyone knew my face. Where could I go, who would have me, who would hide me, after the awful thing I’d done? I was told to wait, so I waited. The Army wasn’t finished with me yet. I wasn’t surprised. The Army could always find work for a monster, in Viet Nam.
They finally came for me in the early hours of the morning. It’s an old trick. Catch a man off guard, while he’s still half-drugged with sleep, and his physical and mental defenses are at their dimmest. Except I was up and out of bed and on my feet the moment I heard footsteps outside my door, hands reaching for weapons I wasn’t allowed any more. It’s the first thing you learn in country, if you want to stay alive in country. So when the two armed guards kicked my door in, I was waiting for them. I smiled at them, showing my teeth, because I knew that upset people. Apparently I don’t smile like a person any more.
The guards didn’t react. Just gestured for me to leave the room and walk ahead of them. I made a point of gathering up a few things I didn’t need, just to show I wasn’t going to be hurried; but I was more eager to get going than they were. Finally, someone had made a decision. The Army was either going to give me a mission, or put me up against a wall and shoot me. And I really wasn’t sure which I wanted most.
I ended up in a cramped little room, far away from anything like official channels. My armed guard closed the door carefully behind me, and locked it from the outside. There was a chair facing a desk, and a man sitting behind the desk. I sat down in the chair without waiting to be asked, and the man smiled. He was big, bulk rather than fat, and his chair made quiet sounds of protest whenever he shifted his weight. He had a wide happy face under a shaven head, and he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He could have been a civilian contractor, or any of a dozen kinds of businessman, but he wasn’t. I knew who he was, what he had to be. Perhaps because one monster can always recognize another.
“You’re CIA,” I said, and he nodded quickly, smiling delightedly.
“And people say you’re crazy. How little they know, Captain Marlowe.”
I studied him thoughtfully. Despite myself, I was intrigued. It had been a long time since I met anyone who wasn’t afraid of me. The CIA man had a slim gray folder set out on the desk before him. Couldn’t have had more than half a dozen pages in it, but then, I’d only done one thing that mattered since they dropped me off here and bet me I couldn’t survive. Well, I showed them.
“You know my name,” I said. “What do I call you?”
“You call me ‘Sir.’” He laughed silently, enjoying the old joke. “People like me don’t have names. You should know that. Most of the time we’re lucky if we have job descriptions. Names come and go, but the work goes on. And you know what kind of work I’m talking about. All the nasty, necessary things that the Government, and the People, don’t need to know about. I operate without restrictions, without orders, and a lot of the time I make use of people like you, Captain Marlowe, because no one’s more expendable than a man with a death sentence hanging over him. I can do anything I want with you; and no one will give a damn.”
“Situation entirely normal, then,” I said. “Sir.”
He flashed me another of his wide, meaningless smiles, and leafed quickly through the papers in my file. There were photos too, and he took his time going through them. He didn’t flinch once. He finally closed the file, tapped the blank cover with a heavy finger a few times, and then met my gaze squarely.
“You have been a bad boy, haven’t you, Captain? One hundred and seventeen men, women, and children, including babes in arms, all wiped out, slaughtered, on one very busy afternoon, deep in country. You shot them until you ran out of bullets, you bayoneted them until the blade broke, and then you finished the rest off with the butt of your rifle, your bare hands, and a series of improvised blunt instruments. You broke in skulls, you tore out throats, you ripped out organs and you ate them. When your company finally caught up with you, you were sitting soaking your bare feet in the river, surrounded by the dead, soaked in their blood, calmly smoking a cigarette. Was it an enemy village, Captain?”
“No.”
“Did anyone attack you, threaten you?”
“No.”
“So why did you butcher an entire village of civilians, Captain Marlowe?”
I showed him my smile again. “Because it was there. Because I didn’t like the way they looked at me. Does it matter?”
“Not particularly, no.” The CIA man leaned forward across the desk, fixing me with his unblinking happy gaze. “You’re not here to be court-martialed, Captain. It has already been decided, at extremely high levels, that none of this ever happened. There never was any massacre; there never was any crazy captain. Far too upsetting, for the folks at home. Instead, I have been empowered to offer you a very special, very important, very…sensitive mission. Carry it out successfully, and this file will disappear. You will be given an honorable discharge, and allowed to go home.”
“First thing you learn in the Army,” I said, “is never volunteer. Especially not for very special, important, and sensitive missions.”
“Should you decline this opportunity, I am also empowered to take you out the back of this building and put two bullets in your head,” said the CIA man, still smiling.
I surprised him by actually taking a moment to think about it. If this mission was too important for the Army, and too dangerous for the CIA, and they needed a monster like me to carry it out successfully…it had to involve something even worse than wiping out a whole village of noncombatants. And, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go home. After everything I’d seen, and done. I still loved the memories I had, of family and friends. I didn’t like to think of their faces, when they realized what had come home to them. I didn’t like to think of them with a monster in their midst, walking around, hidden behind my old face.
I didn’t want to stay in Hell, but there was enough of a man left in me that I knew I had no business contaminating the streets of Heaven with my bloody presence.
So I nodded to the CIA man, and he sank back into his chair, which made piteous sounds of protest as his weight settled heavily again. He opened a drawer in his desk, put away my file, and took out another. It was much thicker than mine. The cover was still blank. Not even a file number. Just like mine. The CIA man opened it, took out a glossy 8 by 10, and skimmed it across the desk to me. I looked at the photo, not touching it. The officer looking back at me had all the right stripes and all the right medal ribbons, and a bland, impassive face with no obvious signs of character or authority.