Gods Go Begging (16 page)

“Love songs were written for intact skin!” muttered the chaplain, who sobbed uncontrollably as he spoke. “I am a fucking fraud.”

At another time he would have winced at the vulgarity of his own words. He had recited the Extreme Unction into the ears of scores of eighteen-year-olds and he had never once had the strength to “sell the prayer,” as they called it at chaplain’s school. How on earth can you be a thespian when a severed artery is spurting all over your script, when desperation is always stepping on your lines? Out of craven fear he had rushed his prayers. Like a drunken, harried actor he had mumbled his way through his forgotten lines. He had ushered his boys—his flock—off to eternity with a shoddy, extemporaneous supplication ringing in their ears.

The padre raised his eyes to the horizon. In a single night he had acquired the combat veteran’s hardened eyes and numbed face. Out there somewhere, the sermons were already being said for the Russian boy. The swing shift at graves registration in Da Nang would already be generating an inventory of his parts and categorizing his remains as unviewable. Apprentice morticians would scurry for a shot at his corpse. A forklift at a warehouse near China Beach would he taking his aluminum casket down from the high, shining stacks. It had been made for him. The metal had been smelted, stressed, and formed especially for him. Before the Russian boy was born, the aluminum ore had been dug from the ground just for him.

Forms would be filled out in duplicate directing that other forms be filled out in triplicate. In some Quonset hut in Da Nang the boilerplate notice of death and letter of condolence were being cut by a clerk-typist, a private first class with just one month in country. Somewhere else a bored captain whose short-timer calendar was almost completely filled would sign a tall stack of such letters using a rubber stamp of his signature.

In just a few days Roosky’s mother would find the dreaded letter in her mailbox. She would wait long, terrible hours before opening it. Her unheard wails would assail the walls of her little home with unremitting grief. In one instant her soul would flood with every bedspread that she had straightened for him, every bowl of borscht and every meat pie that she had ever cooked for him, every laughing sigh at his seeming inability to change his dirty underwear. Someday, somewhere, his two brothers were lying awake at night straining to recall the features of his face. Someday, somewhere, fingers were already reaching out to touch cold, dark marble, to follow the deep, chiseled letters of his engraved name. Somewhere a flag was being folded, corner to corner to corner. Now it is being placed into the hands of a woman.

“I am the resurrection and the life….” The chaplain groaned, using his forearms to cover his own contorted face. Hours ago he had tried his best to speak into this boy’s ear, but the sight of a perfectly formed concha and an unstained lobe amidst all of the ruin had overcome him once again. The sweaty, bloody boy had expired without forgiveness.

“Combat makes the skin permeable, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it, sergeant? Everyone here is covered with blood and sweat and piss. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? We’re protecting our innermost fluids while trying to cause leaks in the skin of the enemy. There’s even a technical word for it, isn’t there? An ugly acronym: SLUD. Salivation, lacrimation, urination, and defecation.”

“Padre,” said the black sergeant patiently, “can I tell you something?
Ecoutez-moiun moment.”
The padre nodded without uncovering his sickened face.

“After this, after what you’ve seen here, your old life is nothing but a lie.”

After a moment of silence the chaplain responded weakly, “What do you mean?” The statement had struck its mark at the very center of the chaplain’s soul. His own life was truly nothing but a lie.

“When you was back in the world, there was happiness and sadness, of course—car accidents, promotions, demotions, tragic illnesses, and birthdays. Sometimes you was sick, but mostly you was feeling
tres bien,
feeling pretty good.”

The chaplain nodded weakly. His eyes were still dilated and his skin was clammy and gray with shock. His former life now seemed like a dream.

“Now and again a close relative passes on; someone who seemed happy turns around and blows their brains out and some completely unworthy fool goes and wins the lottery. Remember the world, padre? Now, padre, let’s say that your old life was a car with a nice, big speedometer on the dashboard. When you was happy, you would be cruising along at sixty. Top speed was around seventy miles an hour. When you was sad, your life would be pokin’ along at ten miles an hour or sometimes even slower.”

The chaplain dropped his arms and opened his eyes, squinting at the unbelievable ugliness around him. In the clearing at the base of the hill, a suffering North Vietnamese soldier lifted his arm straight into the air. From somewhere to the right a shot rang out and the North Vietnamese soldier slumped and died, his final request granted.

“Please forgive me, but I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to say.”

“Padre,” continued the sergeant calmly, “since you been to the Nam, since you been on this red dirt hill, that old speedometer of yours has just got to be tossed out. It’s outdated. It’s junk. Now you understand that there’s happiness far beyond sixty miles an hour, and there’s sadness and grief way, way down below zero. Do you remember how happy you were this morning when the dinks who breached the western perimeter were stopped and the incoming ceased and you found yourself in one piece?”

The padre nodded. There was extreme joy and a hint of shame in his nod. His relief at having survived was an ecstasy beyond expression and beyond measure. His relief had been beyond holy.

“Think about how sad you are right now about that hoy’s death, about all of their deaths. You’re feelin’ it now, padre That old life of yours back in the world was a lie. You had a small speedometer, padre. A tiny, pathetic little gauge up there on the dashboard of your existence. Until something goes terribly wrong, everyone back home is idling in first gear. All of them are asleep. Before you came here, padre, you was idling, too.”

There was simmering anger in the sergeant’s voice. “ ‘War’ was just a word in some politician’s mouth. ’Combat’ was a word that bartenders and sportscasters used to describe a football game. ‘Sudden death’ was something that jocks looked forward to in a game that’s gone into overtime. ’Next of kin’ was just a phrase, just a bunch of faceless people back in the world. It was all a judas-goat lie, like John Wayne wading through Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, and them recruitment posters.”

The two men moved to the last body bag. Beneath the flap and closures was the decimated face of a brand new first lieutenant. He had been platoon leader for exactly two days. The chaplain shook his head violently, so the sergeant opened the bag and removed the dog tags. He tore one tag from its small chain, then placed the other one into the mouth of the dead soldier. The first tag was handed to the chaplain. The sergeant lifted the first lieutenant’s jaw to close it, then snapped the bag shut. The tag was designed to be wedged into the matching gaps in the upper and lower front teeth, then the jaw would he jammed shut by shoving the chin. But the sergeant had never been able to do it.

“Remember all those folks that come on the television after surviving an airplane crash? They all say that their life has been changed forever, that they’re really gonna appreciate their life after coming so close to losing it. The grunts over here, the boys with their asses in the grass, they go through a plane crash every fucking day, sometimes every hour. No matter how much preparation you do or how much equipment you got, when there’s contact with Charlie everything falls to shit, it’s one terrible accident after another.

“I don’t give a good goddamn about all them fancy plans and code names them brass-plated idiots over in Da Nang dream up—it all falls apart out here.
Jelesemmerde!
But out here, no airline sends a team of psychologists to help them.” He pointed to a group of troops below. “Nobody will ever give a shit. No one will ever come along to readjust their speedometers. If they get out of here alive, they will always be running at a different speed. A normal day back in the world won’t even register on their instruments. The world won’t move them no more. Whether you live or die, once you been here you become invisible to normal people. The ones that live ain’t never the same.” The sergeant paused. “There ain’t no justice out here, man, there’s just us.”

The sergeant placed an arm on the chaplain’s shoulder.

“Look here at these young ones, padre.” The sergeant gestured down the hill toward another group of men. “Shit, they ain’t figured out how to undo a brassiere or how to ask a woman for a date yet, and some of them will never get that chance. And here they’re supposed to solve the great mystery! Don’t none of them even know what the question is, and here they’ve got a face-to-face look at the final answer. ‘t’hey’re the toughest motherfuckers on earth, but they’re just boys, bedwetters and jackoffs. You’d think a fair God would let ‘em have one fuck before they get blown apart, just one little old mercy fuck.”

A new flood of perspiration had broken out on the sergeant’s face. It was not the salty sheen of hard labor or the oily slick generated by fear. It was the pure, plaintive sweat of helplessness, the sweat of a childhood fever.

“These boys are fighting a two-front war, padre. That was the mistake the Germans made in World War Two. They’re fighting the Vietnamese and they’re fighting America, too. For most of these black kids the army is the first time they have ever been allowed to sit and eat with whites—at least they can in this platoon. Back in the world, you never see what you’re looking at right now: Mexican kids talking with blacks. It’s rare, even here. Shit, I’ve seen platoons that are as segregated as Selma. Some of these boys from the reservations ain’t never seen a white man except on television, and here they’re fighting for him. Shit, this fucking police action ain’t nothing but a turf war. Today it’s ours, tomorrow it’ll be theirs.”

The sergeant dropped his head and was silent for a moment. Beads of sweat fell from his forehead and nose.

“Did you notice, lieutenant, that beside some of those Montagnards over there, you and me and the skipper over in HQ are the only grown-up men here? Shit, some of them zips that breached the wire last night don’t even have pubic hair yet.
C”est un baller bleu infame!
That’s what this is,
un
ballet
bleu infame.“

The padre’s contorted face somehow managed a look of confusion.

“The infamous blue ballet,” translated the sergeant. “The infamous blue ballet is a French phrase that means lewd acts with underage boys. That’s exactly how it’s described in the French penal code. That’s all this fucking war adds up to, lieutenant: lewd acts with boys.”

The sergeant whimpered, then drew his sleeve across his face and cheeks. He wondered why he had waited so long to speak his mind. He had been a good soldier for so long that he had never seen the good in thinking about the bigger picture. Down below, in a bunker on the northeastern quadrant of the perimeter, a grizzled old Montagnard corporal repeated the sergeant’s phrase:
“Ban vu halê xanh nõi tiêng.”
The infamous blue ballet. His old eyes had seen the French boys in these same trenches, and the Japanese before them. He had heard the phrase before. He had witnessed this same form of pornography time and time again.

“You’ve heard their crazy philosophy discussions, haven’t you. their supposings?” asked the sergeant. “I know you’ve taken part in some of their bull sessions, I’ve heard you. These boys have two choices out here, either give in to the obscenity or do something to try to keep their sanity. Kids that see this kind of shit always got a lifetime’s worth of questions to ask. Death don’t just brush by you out here, it takes your head in its jaws and sticks its thick tongue clear down your throat. It’s the French kiss from hell. You have to give a shit, padre. It’s your job to give a shit about these guys. Please excuse my French, but, shit, right now is the first time that you’re really capable of it.
C‘est la
goddamn
verité.
That’s the God’s truth.”

Behind them, on the range of high hills that hid Laos from view, the sun was just setting. The clear sky was beginning to fill with stars at its western edge, and fingers of amber were shooting up toward the Southern Cross.

“Now you know what terror feels like, padre.” The sergeant lit a cigarette. He had quit smoking on his last trip home, but out here, cancer didn’t mean shit. “I could never have explained it to you before. The old elephant came and sat on your chest, didn’t he? The lightning bolt went through your asshole and up your spine. The electricity is still there, ain’t it? It’ll burn for years.”

The chaplain nodded. The sparks were still dancing on his spinal column. The fear had been overwhelming, suffocating, completely debilitating. The fear had been bestial. He had been paralyzed by the desperate, selfish need to survive. Even hours afterward, his muscles were still quaking spasmodically, coming down from a deluge of adrenaline. The muscles of his jaw were swollen from clenching, his teeth hurt, and his intestines ached from the internal pressure. His mouth and gums burned with the tides of bile that had risen, then fallen in his esophagus all night long. His ears were still ringing from the reports of a hundred rifles, and his knees ached. He had probably crawled ten miles over the face of this hill following the medic from wound to terrible wound.

“You’ve met the beast, padre. You peeked into the dungeon and caught a glimpse at the secret. Now you know what those boys know. To live, you would run with spiked boots on a sidewalk made of newborn babies. You would step on your dear sweet mother’s face to keep from getting dismembered, to keep from having your nuts shot off. You’ve learned that every bullet Charlie takes raises your odds of leaving here alive. But it ain’t all bad. Amazing as it seems, padre, there is one benefit to having your brains and stomach slow-cooked by hatred and fear.”