“There’s still much we can do,” he whispered to end the ritual, and damned himself for a liar each time. It seemed the best he could do was imagine the worst.
6
DANIEL HAD BEEN forced to endure many trips into the minds of soldiers during combat. It had become a constant theme in his compulsory role-playing, so apparently it was a primary area of interest in the roaches’ studies, but at least in Daniel’s case the results were mixed. It was almost always a frenetic and fragmented experience, frequently brief, as he was jerked out of these scenarios for a variety of reasons including bodily trauma and death. He wondered if the roaches had been unable to get a stable read of these personalities because of the volatile nature of most combat experiences. The stray thoughts he caught were like unstable bombs threatening to blow up in his face.
Fighting the enemies of freedom to spread democracy throughout the world.
“Why do they hate us?” It always shocked Daniel to discover that Americans were hated. “Is that what brought the towers down?”
A pre-emptive strike. A fight to remain dominant.
“Sergeant Taylor?” Voices like insect scrapes across the brain, painful and annoying at a low level, but he was trained to ignore such tiny, irritating voices. He was glad they didn’t use his first name. Perhaps “Sergeant” had become his new first name. He doubted he would ever use his given name again.
Of course Taylor wasn’t his name, either. He’d been misidentified. His face must really be messed up. He’d become the unknown soldier. How much of the rest of him was left?
“What do you think he thinks about?”
“Nothing. How could he? He doesn’t move; he barely breathes. Look at his eyes. They don’t blink.”
“Has anyone on the staff seen him close his eyes? Does he sleep?”
“Look at his eyes, so dry. They should put more drops in them. How could a man stay sane without sleep?”
So they weren’t doctors or nurses. Maybe they were orderlies, or maybe cleaning people. Good, he was sick of doctors and nurses. He’d rather talk to the regular guys cleaning up piss and blood. If he could talk.
“I hear he used to talk.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t answer any of their questions. He only talked about what he wanted to talk about. And then one day he just stopped talking.”
Black clouds of smoke drifting with veins of blue. He dropped like a burning cinder, the jungle shooting up around him. Dark wings covered him. Sharp legs and brittle antennae massaged his brain, working their way into his thoughts. The smell of phosphorous so strong it pinched the nostrils. The smell of napalm and the smell of human flesh burning. The evil stench of insect bodies massed for an attack.
AND SUDDENLY DANIEL was out of that soldier, and into another grunt back in Vietnam. Pinkville, up against the border. He skipped through their heads like a stone thrown by a boy across a dark and deceptively still pond. My Lai. Charlie Company. 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division.
He’d heard that Captain Medina’d said nothing would be left alive in the village. That wasn’t a direct order, but leave it to Lieutenant Calley to try to make it happen. Calley was Medina’s bitch, and nothing he could do would please him, but he kept on trying. They all should’ve just walked away, pretended they didn’t hear him that day. Some of them did, and some of them would feel okay about it either way, but for the rest of his life he would wonder if he could have, should have done something.
The film of it was embedded in his head: all those people begging and screaming, and Calley firing into that ditch, and the emotions so high his eyes were burning, the sky in his private film burning, those dying breaths turning into dark plumes of smoke. He had to admit, he used to call them gooks, but not after that. Never after that.
It was your duty, basically, to go to war. He’d even believed in the Domino Theory. But God knows, not that.
SERGEANT TAYLOR WRINKLED his nose, even though he didn’t have a nose anymore. The smell of burning shit. That was his first smell of Vietnam—out where there wasn’t any plumbing they collected all the human shit in barrels, soaked it in fuel oil and set it on fire. Guys had to stir the barrels to make sure it all burned. Always a bad smell, a bad taste. Pale, bloodless faces. Dark, yellowish, insect-like heads. The salt taste of blood in the mouth. The need to bite, to chew, to rip, to tear tender skin. The need to smash like some rampaging god. To ignite mayhem. Sergeant Taylor used to talk often about the lies of Vietnam. There was little else to do.
Taylor loved the way Alex smiled. He was a good boy. Blond hair, skinny, and eighteen years old. Basketball player, playing now for God and country. He didn’t pay much attention to what Taylor said, or at least he didn’t act like he did. Still, he was a good boy. But hell, the kid didn’t know what they were going to ask him to do. None of them did. Hell, the whole damn country had no idea what it was trying to face.
“Now the way I parse it out,” Taylor continued, “is that you first got your big lies. Everybody knows what the big lies are, whether they think of them as lies or not. You know, son, lies about whether we can win or not, or whether we belong here in the first place. The lies that got us into this mess. Then there’s the medium sized lies, don’t you see, like The Body Count Lie, or the Stupid Math Lie, as I like to call it.”
He stared at the boy, who now grinned in embarrassment. Taylor figured the kid was scared to death that some brown bar or the C.O. might walk by. He really shouldn’t do this to the boy, he supposed. Damn them all, though. They spend all their time teaching kids in school about being heroic, about being noble and giving your life to something bigger than yourself. They don’t teach you about the nights and what to do when you’re ass-deep in the dark. These people here in Nam, they’ve lived in the dark for a long, long time. They know it’s got teeth and a belly it needs to fill. They know you have to grow teeth, too, if you’re going to survive it. You have to embrace it and become the goddamned God of Mayhem. The number of dead don’t matter, except the bodies are just something more you can feed it. What the hell does a body count mean out here anyway?
“You know about the body count, don’t you, soldier? Haven’t you counted no bodies yet? For shame. You know, twenty here. Sixteen back there—oops—one of them’s ours from that not-so-friendly fire so better make that fifteen. Twenty-five over there, but that count includes two cows, three civilians, and a fence post. Out here we use that new Stupid Math. Forty-two in the next county, but then them were all civilians. Now, you got to be careful not to miss the bodies left in the ditches, stacked on the trails like bags of dirty laundry, the bodies in the house, the bodies hanging from the trees, the body fertilizer, the body mayonnaise. How many arms or how many legs or—here’s a tough one for you—how many pounds of loose gut equal one body on the C.O.’s body count report?”
Alex wasn’t smiling anymore. Sergeant Taylor could dearly appreciate that. Wasn’t a damn thing to smile about.
“But, now, it’s the little bitty lies that’ve always interested me, the people lies. Like the lie that said you wouldn’t be afraid when you got over here, that you’d be some kind of frigging freedom fighter, or that they’ll all be treating you like a fucking hero when you get home. You listen to Sergeant Taylor, boy. Ain’t going to happen. Ain’t no way. Like the lie that says you’ll go back in one piece. Like the lie that says you’re a wholesome, all American boy and you’re going to stay that way. The lie that says you ain’t going to turn into a fucking monster over here.”