“Now, wait a minute, Sarge. Pretty personal, aren’t you?”
“It’s a damn personal war, son.”
“I don’t intend to change.”
“Now I am relieved.”
“So, if you hate it so much, why are you here? You already had your tour, you went back for a while, so why’d you sign on for another one?”
Taylor just stared at him. Insect legs scratched along the back of his brain, trying to find the right words for him to say. “My business, son,” he finally said. “Go check your gear. Moving out soon.” The boy strode off with a little swagger. Probably thinking he’d finally caught his old Sarge on something. Maybe he had.
LIEUTENANT CALLEY WASN’T the only one trotting after the Captain like a little puppy dog. They would have followed Medina anywhere. He gave them those cards, the Ace of Spades, because they were “death dealers,” okay? They were supposed to drop those on every gook they killed.
Still, Calley was the worst, always trying to please Medina, and it only made the Captain call the lieutenant a little shit, and that’s how he treated him.
If Bill Webber hadn’t been killed, maybe things would have been different. He was the first, and that started the dying, and then they went through that mine field. They had one soldier split right up the middle. The villagers could have said something, warned them. That changed the rules—destroying villages became the standard.
It wouldn’t have been wise for the villagers to point out the mines, though. Folks like that, they stayed alive by keeping their mouths shut. It was a bad situation for everybody concerned.
The company set up a perimeter around the village. Those villagers never saw it coming. The older ones had told the younger ones that the Americans were different—they brought candy bars. Not that the Vietnamese didn’t resent being occupied, but the Americans could be trusted.
The real problem, though, was there was bad intel. Medina had been told the Cong’s 48th Infantry was holed up there around the village. There weren’t supposed to be any civilians. And when the companyfound civilians, Medina wouldn’t adjust his thinking. It was going to be all out war.
FOR A LONG time Taylor believed he signed up again because of the way people had treated him back home in the bars, at parties, whenever they found out what he was and where he’d been. But there was more to it than that, and those motherfuckers back home probably saw that part of it written all over his sweating face.
“You’re in the service?” His old friends had told him it was a bad idea to wear the uniform, but he hadn’t listened. It pissed him off when people said crap like that.
“Yeah. Be out for good soon, I reckon.”
“Nam?” The man’s tone made Taylor uneasy. The girlfriend just sat there, staring past the man’s shoulder, pale lips pouted and eyes blazing.
“Yeah.”
“How many did you kill?” And there it was. They always asked that first thing, or after they’d beaten around the bush awhile. Nobody had told Taylor it’d be like that when he got home.
Taylor tried a smile, but it felt too much like the kind of smile you made sometimes back in Nam. You’d have been up for days, strung out on the fighting and running just on fatigue and adrenalin, and there’d be some little hurt kid you’re trying to make feel better, so you try to smile, and it’s only after you’ve been making that smile awhile that you realize the muscles in half your face aren’t working anymore; they’re frozen solid. “Hey, why don’t you let me buy you and your girl a drink?” he finally said.
The man almost smiled himself. Then the girlfriend leaned over and with her lips barely moving she said, “So how did it feel, murdering women and babies?”
Taylor had a wife, two kids, a small dog and a couple of cats back home. He’d never lost his temper with any of them. He’d get angry sometimes, and feel pressured, and sometimes they’d box him in. But he never hit any of them, never even thought to. Sometimes he felt he could have been a lot more than he was, if he hadn’t gotten married. And that pissed him off some. But he didn’t hit anybody for it. He’d get a little agitated, a belly ache sometimes. He went out back sometimes and chopped a month’s worth of firewood, or broke every bottle he could find in the trash. But he never hit anybody.
On that first trip home he found he couldn’t understand people, not even his family. He had no idea what they were talking about half the time, or why.
It was fucking unbelievable back home. It didn’t look anything like what he remembered, or like any of the pictures the wife sent him or he saw in magazines. Somebody had faked it all up, and trying to figure out why they did it made him scared, and dangerous-feeling.
Insects became rampant and joyful, dancing up and down inside his skull.
Most people didn’t want to talk about the war. They acted like you had bad breath or were crazy when you tried to talk to them about it.
And something else peculiar. The people walking around in one piece. There’d been so many ways to lose a piece of you in Nam—satchel charges, punji sticks, grenades, booby traps, swing limbs, little spring-detonated bombs in old C ration cans, Bouncing Betty mines made to cut you in half at the groin. Regular bullets would do as well, zipping by you like supersonic bees. When he got back he expected half the young guys to be missing something. There should have been amputees everywhere. But he hardly ever saw any; where’d they put them all? It made him damned mad—he used to wonder if they had them all down in the cellars or something.
CHARLIE COMPANY OPENED fire on the people running around in the village, because they’d been promised all those folk would be VC. VC only.
Once the first civilians were killed…
There was nothing more to be done. Charlie Company was shooting them all. It became unstoppable. They were angry, they were frustrated, and they’d been told this was the enemy.
Bodies began to accumulate, women and kids. Someone thought they saw Medina himself kick a woman to death, but they couldn’t be sure.
TAYLOR TOOK THE second tour because he had changed. He wasn’t used to the old way of doing things. In Nam there were only a few ways to get high, to get the adrenalin pumping, to satisfy your spirit. You shot, you killed, you ran for your life, you had cheap sex with the slants or you did dope. You had to get used to dead men’s eyes staring right through you, or the awesome sight of a guy’s guts hanging outside him, maybe draped up on his chest. You could actually touch his insides, do things to them. It was all hard to understand.
He wasn’t a racist when he went in. And in the beginning, the way the others talked about the Vietnamese, it made him damn uncomfortable. But if you don’t want a young guy to be a racist, don’t put him in a situation where people of another color are always shooting at him trying to kill him. It takes a super amount of will power not to become a racist in that kind of situation. And if you want young men to think independently and question orders and to be good moral decision makers, again, don’t put a gun to their heads. Don’t put them in a war. Human beings, they just want to live. That shit’s imperative.
His first few days in country they’d had him handling body bags and making counts. And playing with the VC bodies. Sometimes a grunt that had been there awhile would decide to initiate a new guy. After a number of months, though, Taylor felt like he’d been there years already.
Taylor got to break in a new guy. A lot like Alex. Sweet boy, shy, good-natured kid. Taylor took the kid out to a rocky outcropping overlooking the Saigon River. They’d had heavy action the past week, and they’d piled the VC bodies up around these rocks. A couple of dozen, maybe more.