Thanks for handing me grandpa’s buck knife before the bus for Travis took off. I’m sorry I never got a chance to use it before crap hit the fan and everybody scattered to the winds. The last I ever caught a glimpse of that elk-horn grip was that morning, before the column headed out, where it was wedged at the bottom of my ruck between a pack of Philip Morris cigs and canned weenies—all stuff that I doubt I’ll ever get back, if at all. Because there’s no way the folks coming out of the scorched woodwork are gonna resist raiding someone’s leftovers for just a little more smokes, food, or ammo. I only hope that someone bailing out of the helos found it. It’s not much of a comforting thought, but it sure beats either rusting buried a foot under the grass or in some ratty hand scraping the embroidery off a pair of fatigues.
I love this. I love this. It so interesting that the story opens with a paragraph about a knife. Its smartly humanizing how this character respects the knife so much, and by extension, his grandfather, that he would rather it be in someone else's hands and be used than be rusting away. It gives such intricacies to this man in a paragraph made up of less than two-hundred words. I don't think he's sorry to his mother for not using it, I think he's sorry to himself. Or maybe to the knife. Or maybe to his grandfather. Or maybe all of those things.
The only thing that kept me sane for that whole time, floored by the bedsheets and the bloodied scalpel sitting on top of a Bible only a stone’s throw away, was my rifle manual. Well, it wasn’t truly mine, because mine decided to take a swim in a paddy and disintegrated. When the kid from Arkansas with the mangled chest passed on the second day I was thrown in there, leaving behind a dime-store novel and candies from his mother which arrived just hours too late and a tally mark for the mid-day’s bird, the nurses cleared his bed and started to toss his stuff out.
Everyone, when in dire circumstance, clings to something to keep them sane. In the chaos of war, the order of a rifle manual is definitely something that makes sense to hold to. After reading the manual, the near-gallows humor makes sense for a soldier faced with one of the fiercest wars of the decade. Fascinating how he gets the manual from someone else, drawing connections back to his knife. Perhaps this dead and mangled fellow really would have wanted someone else to share that order with.
It’s a flimsy little thing, composed of dog-eared laminated pages backed with the crusted over droplets of fetid water. I’ve made a habit, lately, of cracking it open every night, tracing with a finger the soiled hatching marks, trying to wrap my concentration again around the every whims and nuances of a chunk of milled steel and polymer named Maggie. When I got to the end, staring into nothing in particular and trying to picture oiling and fitting together parts that I no longer could fit together, much less hold, I would turn it back over. I would do that several times, until my eyes gave out and I buried my head under my pillow.
The book being flimsy and fetid is sorta representing how the soldier's mental state is, methinks. Ordered towards order, yet marred by experience of chaos.
I actually tried to give the damn thing another read over this morning, before the nurses yanked me by the crook of my arm and hobbled me downstairs, but it was useless. The whole novelty of it all long had worn away, and after that shot entered my arm I felt like I was staring straight into a abstract painting while my old art teacher babbled on and on about dead Picassos…my mind converging into one track of tensioning mantras:
And yet the solider realizes it for what it is: propaganda designed to assuage soldiers into doing something to keep them from insanity. He is not oblivious to its purpose. He does not discard of it, but it is taken from him, though he offers no resistance. He does not plead for it back. In a way, the comic also glorifies something that this soldier knows is not to be glorified.
I don’t want to think about it. I wished that I didn’t want to think about it. The only thing that hellhole of an intensive care unit was good at was misting all forms of coherent thought. In the strange barnyard where the nurses bawked, playing a drunken Napoleon, waddling back and forth in their roost while the doctors crept through the mesh, clutching their prize in their fangs, being just about brain dead like an egg was preferable to thinking straight.
Wonderful how the line "I don't want to think about it." and "I wished that I didn't want to think about it." conflict. The ward induces this sort of sterile, white-noise state of mind, which is preferable to the alternative.
I don’t want to think straight. I don’t think I can think straight. The linchpins holding the shelf up had been yanked out, long before the oil-nub eyes of Pasquier glanced off my bandages and I pressed my face against the window. I really didn’t, but as I just stood there dumb, drumming my fingers on the leaded glass, I couldn’t help it. And…for this one track mind, when the tape’s clamped tight around the heads, the tendency is to start reeling it back and play it all over again.
Another interesting comparison in "I don't want to think straight" and "I don't think I can think straight." The text then later points out that the real wounds weren't those he sustain physically, but instead "The linchpins holding the shelf up". The shelf is his mind, and those linchpins (the knife, the book) keeping it from toppling were already gone.
The heap of a South Vietnamese tank burning in the middle of the road. The twisting forms of Ruff Puffs stumbling away as their commander burned to a crisp over the turret. A jeep swerving off the road, slamming headfirst into a ditch. Armored personnel carriers in deadlock. Screams. Cut short by deafening flashes from the treeline. The twitching mass of what once was an altar boy from Des Moines dropping away in the humid air. Machine guns opening up, raking lead into the trees. A radio croaked for helos and barbeque. I hit the ground running. Something perched up on the crown of a tamarind dropped straight down with a sickening crack—even now, I don’t know whether that was a loose branch or a person.
Chaos. Utter chaos. "The twitching mass of what once was an altar boy from Des Monies dropping away in the humid air." This line is so visceral because there was no reason for the audience to know this character was an altar boy from Des Monies. And yet, that fact portrays a scene of such chaos where innocence is crushed completely. "Something perched up on the crown of a tamarind dropped straight down with a sickening crack—even now, I don’t know whether that was a loose branch or a person." Adds to that frenzy of battle.
But it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter at all.
Conveys something I will hopefully never understand fully.
Because I steadied that thing—one of the so-called ‘finest military rifles ever made’, and pulled the trigger. Pulled it again, again, and again, feeling that bolt cycle, kicking into my shoulder, ejecting brass cases that cauterized my knuckles, and, when the pin shot forward into nothing, thumbed for the catch. I must have sent ten, twelve slugs into the brush before that too, ran dry, and, I was about to fish out my last mag, I was shot. Shot in the sense that some searing hot rod had been impaled clear through my stomach…I felt myself sway. Sway and fall to my knees. In those last few seconds before the napalm hit, setting the entire world ablaze, crushing the wind out of my lungs as it drew in what little air that still hung around, I caught a good glimpse of the backside of my hand. It was still wrapped around the magazine. Quivering, bloodied fingers crusted over aluminum and glimmering brass.
The perceived uselessness of the random firing adds to the tension and the desperation felt by the protagonist. The uselessness in the face of such chaos, just for it all to be burned away. The way you describe the bullet impact is incredible. It's as if you'd been shot yourself.
God, I should stop thinking. But I couldn’t. Because when the tape loosens and starts to slip back, softly falling for the floor, the instinct is to reach out and grip it back, as if it really was something worth a second listen to—even when that tune—that music—lost all time, all meaning. So I kept drumming those fingers, smelling of laundry detergent and watered down rubbing alcohol against the windowpane…
Again returning to that desperation to embrace the haze, but knowing it to be impossible.
I saw something beautiful today.
A relation to the first line. As if this character literally could not conceive seeing anything beautiful at all.
Dancing girls weren’t anything special—Saigon was chock full of them, dressed in skimpy leotards that rotated in and out at all hours of the night through the watering holes and hookah lounges. But unlike the night doves, who always attracted a packed house, gyrating their hips under sickly red, blue, and green hues to the tune of the tinny stereo system as airmen, caught up in visions of SAMS swatting their birds out of the sky in a flaming heap over the Ho-Chi Minh Trail, stuffed their purses full of bills while knocking back beers and rice liquor, nobody stopped to watch.
No one stops to watch this beauty unfold save for the soldier in the window. I think this speaks to the fact that sometimes only people in dire circumstances can find the little things of beauty in life.
A policeman heading upstream touched the crown of his cap and hurried across the road.
Moped riders and truck drivers gunned their engines and whipped by.
Helos and bird dogs circled overhead.
The world turned ever on.
Still, she kept on dancing. There was something cathartic yet pained in the way she moved, looming together her hands and shuffling back and forth in time to the dappled strokes of a weathered bow scraping over strings, stretched too loose, too soft…too lost, over snakeskin.
…the slow warble that spoke, spoke of days I never will know, with a one track mind like this, staring out the window… ever higher. It spoke…spoke of days, days simmering in the still heat, untouched by fatigues, cordite, napalm and M16s. Before the foxholes and brass casings sunk their jowls into the soft dirt, and kids from the backroads of Arkansas still laughed at dime store novels.
This is so cool! Its the soldier realizing there were days of beauty before this war. For him. For others. Good things could, or at least once did, exist even after this trauma.
And for the first time in a long time, as another policeman, another moped, another truck, another helo, another transport plane passed by…I felt something wet, sticky, that wasn’t blood, sweat, or condensation, drip, bloom and permeate my hospital gown.
Count…count me lucky, Ma.
The soldier cries. Cries at this fact. That there are beautiful things. No one in the world would call this man lucky. No one could say he benefited in any way from anything. And yet, he does. He realizes that there are things beyond just the laminated cover of a rifle manual to keep him sane. These little things. These beautiful things.
Very cool, all-in-all. The whole historical-fiction genre is something I've always loved. The way you write is incredibly moving at times. The flow of this story is impeccable. You treat these already real events with such insight that they feel even more real. I have never experienced war. But, in a meager sort of was way, through this piece I can.
