Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (26 page)

"It's not like it's every day," Digger said. "Only when the war heats up and we get a delivery." "Just like fucking Christmas," I said.

"Think about it," said Digger. "Let me know. If you can do it, I'll get your assignment rearranged."

I promised to think about it and said good night. When I walked outside, I discovered that the rain had slowed to a light drizzle. The sun, barely visible, had already heated up the air so that the compound was shrouded in a slow-crawling mist that rose to knee height. Walking through it, I felt like Charon crossing the river Styx, ferrying the dead to the other side.

After a quick shower to wash the stink of formaldehyde from my skin and a shot of Scotch to get the taste of blood out of my throat, I threw myself into my bunk for some much-needed rest. Around me, some men were getting ready for the day, while others, returning from night patrol or other graveyard shift duties, were just coming in. Ignoring the conversations around me, I closed my eyes. Sleep didn't come. Instead, I was visited by the dead. One by one they appeared, standing naked before me, holding the plastic bags containing their belongings in their hands. Their wounds were cleaned, the bullet holes stitched closed, and the ends of missing limbs wrapped in gauze. The violence done to them was, as much as possible, erased, so that when their loved ones received them they would see as little of it as possible. That much we could do for them.

The last one to come was Hector Means. He stood there mutely, his bag held over his genitals. He looked like an overgrown child, shy and uncertain. The terrible head wound was bound up, the hole in his abdomen sutured together with Digger's careful stitches. Looking at him, I imagined him at home, before the war. Had he been loved? Would someone be waiting for him when his plane landed? I thought about the girl in the photograph. It was likely she would never even know he was dead. Had he loved her? Had he told her so, and had she responded in kind?

The stories of Hector Means and the other twenty-five men Digger and I had processed (I hated that word, with its connotations of canning and rendering) were now ended. We had helped write the final chapter. It was, I realized, a weighty responsibility, the gathering up and readying of the dead. I'd begun the job seeing those soldiers as lifeless remains. Now I saw them as sacrifices worthy of remembrance. More than just names and serial numbers on dog tags, they were brothers and husbands, fathers and lovers. Their deaths would, I hoped, mean something to someone beyond being mere casualty statistics. They were men, and they were soldiers, and they needed someone to see them home. I knew that I would tell Digger yes. I'd come to Vietnam looking for something to change me, and I'd found it in a most unexpected place. The dead, I believed, had much to teach me, if only I would listen.

CHAPTER 26
"How did he die?" It seems a simple enough question. And often the given answer is equally simple. "He was shot." "He had a heart attack." "He fell from a great height."

But those are not true answers; they are merely shorthand for the truth. "He had a heart attack," for instance, doesn't begin to describe the process by which the cells of one of the heart muscles, deprived of oxygen due most often to the presence of a thrombus in the coronary artery, die, forcing the remaining muscles to overcompensate and, ultimately, fail. Similarly, death from a "broken neck" is an inadequate but perhaps less distressing way of explaining that when injury occurs to any of the eight cervical vertebrae that comprise the top of the spinal column, resulting in damage to the delicate cord they surround and protect, death may occur either by asphyxiation (if the injury occurs at the fifth vertebrae or above, resulting in loss of breath control), or (if the spinal cord is severely injured or transected at any point) a sudden and severe drop in blood pressure as the nervous system is rendered inoperable. While this shorthand allows us to ignore the less pleasant physical aspects of death and dying, it also fails to acknowledge the surprising number of ways in which human life can be extinguished. As I spent more and more time with Digger, learning what there was to know about the preservation of bodies, I also learned much about how those bodies came to be dead. Die is, after all, a verb, and therefore an action. To die is to be a participant in a series of changes, some of them amazingly complex, that bring about an interruption of the normal processes of life. That this action results in total inaction is possibly the ultimate example of linguistic irony.

There was on the form we filled out for each body a place where we were asked to list the cause of death. We dutifully filled in these blanks with the requested answers—mortar fire, gunshot, bayonet wound—but between us we discussed the more precise reasons. Although he had only basic medical training, Digger was a deeply-knowledgeable student of thanatology. He understood death's methods and means, and his careful attention to the bodies that passed through our doors was due in equal parts to his firm belief that every man deserved to be treated respectfully and to his constant desire to learn more. The arrival of an 18-year-old with fatal shrapnel wounds caused by the faulty placement of a Claymore mine (a tragedy made even more absurd by the fact that the mines are clearly labeled FRONT

TOWARD ENEMY ) presented him with an opportunity to observe firsthand the effects of uniformly-sized lead shot tearing through human flesh and bone at high speed. A body fished from a river two days after death was a lesson in the ability of water and the native fishes to transform a man's face into something unrecognizable.

Digger was less interested in the cataloging of the personal effects that were found on the bodies, and so we often worked in tandem. While he attended to the corpses, I attended to what remained of their lives. More often than not, though, Digger talked as he worked, describing his discoveries and outlining his theories about them in detail. I, in turn, told him what I found in the pockets and rucksacks of the men whose wounds he was exploring. As a result, we often assembled quite a full—if not entirely verifiable—picture of the soldiers whose remains had been delivered into our hands. The things men carry into war say much about who they are. There are the obvious: photos of loved ones, religious talismans, love letters from girlfriends and wives. I removed dozens of these items from pockets and wallets, so many that I was more surprised on the occasions when I did not find them. More interesting were the objects that appeared unexpectedly. One soldier had tucked into a pants pocket a PEZ dispenser featuring the head of Bullwinkle the Moose, the chamber still half full of candy. Another wore around his wrist a bracelet made of the metal pieces taken from a Monopoly game: the tiny shoe, dog, wheelbarrow, cannon, and others linked together on a length of plain white string. A third had in his chest pocket a small envelope containing a lock of coarse dark hair tied with a pink ribbon and a picture of the soldier standing beside a chestnut-colored horse.
I wondered about these things, these charms and tokens. Were they simply reminders of lives left behind, small beacons of light meant to guide the soldiers back? Or did the men ascribe to them some level of magical power, some supernatural ability to grant protection against harm? If so, what did it mean that they had failed? Was it the fault of the magic, or had the faith of the makers or wearers in their potency been lacking? As I put these items into the bags, along with the eyeglasses, watches, and wedding bands, I marveled at the ways in which men put their faith in something apart from their guns and their fellow soldiers. The army had taught us all to depend only on our skills and on our teamwork, but here was evidence that most of us needed something more.

I wondered what the North Vietnamese soldiers carried with them, if they, too, had pockets filled with letters and photographs and small gifts pressed into their hands by loved ones in the hopes that they would bring luck and protection. I imagined my NVA counterpart checking the clothes of his fallen comrades and sorting the bits and pieces of their lives into bags and envelopes to be delivered to grieving families. We were both, it seemed to me, the historians of death. In August my 20th birthday passed, but I didn't remember until three days after, when I was checking an inventory sheet and realized that it was the 14th and that I had left my teenage years behind without celebrating. That night, Digger and some of my other buddies threw me a makeshift party in an underground bunker, complete with Carling Black Label beer on ice and the Rolling Stones on the turntable. My present was a pack of Marlboros that contained not regular cigarettes but enormous joints filled with Hanoi Gold. Each one was exactly the size and shape of a normal cigarette, but the pot inside was more potent than any North Carolina burley tobacco could ever hope to be. After just three hits I was gone, and the rest of the evening was a hazy dream of laughing, drinking, and swapping dirty jokes with my friends. A far cry from the cozy birthday parties I used to share with Jack. It was a celebration of men, and I felt very grown-up indeed.

I felt less so the next morning, when I woke up in my own hootch with a pounding headache and a mouth tasting of stale beer and ash. Slowly I realized that some of the drumming was actually the sound of rain hitting the walls and roof, and the prospect of another wet, muddy day did nothing to improve my mood. I rolled over, tried to go back to sleep, then gave up when I heard the roar of a plane coming in for a landing. Groaning and trying not to move my head too much, I got up and pulled on my clothes. When I reached the GR building, Digger was already at work on a body. Even from the door, I could tell that there was something unusual about it. The skin was discolored, and the smell in the air was stronger than usual. I coughed, and Digger looked back at me.

"You've got to see this," he said as I walked toward the table. "But you're going to want the Vicks."

I stopped and took the jar of Vicks VapoRub from the table on which we stored some of our tools. Opening it, I used my finger to scoop some out and dab it under my nose. Instantly the menthol-camphor scent filled my head, opening my sinuses and erasing not only the peculiar stench in the air but the remaining scent of beer and hash. Normally I hated the stuff, as I associated it with having to do particularly unpleasant work, but that morning it was a welcome relief. My nose girded, I approached Digger and the body he was peering at intently. He moved aside, and I saw that it was a fairly small man. His skin, what there was left of it, was covered in a viscous black substance that looked like tar or burned sugar. I'd never seen anything like it before, and looked questioningly at Digger.

"Napalm," he said.
"Holy shit," I said. "Is he one of our guys?"

Digger shook his head. "Vietnamese," he answered. "But he's a local. Used to help our guys out as a guide."

I'd seen napalm used before, and had been impressed by its ability to burn down everything it touched. I'd witnessed huge chunks of forest reduced to blackened stumps in a matter of minutes. But I'd never seen its effects on a human body before. Looking at the charred corpse in front of me, I couldn't even imagine what his death must have been like.

"You know all those saints and martyrs and witches and whatnot they burned at the stake back in the Middle Ages?" asked Digger as he scraped at some of the black substance on the man's abdomen. It fell away, revealing a raw window of a hole, the view through which made my stomach lurch.

"Yeah," I answered, not understanding what the question had to do with anything.

"If they were lucky, they had themselves a big roaring fire," Digger continued, examining an area on the man's left thigh. "A big fire with lots of smoke. That way, the carbon monoxide knocked them out right away and they died before the fire did too much damage."

"And if they weren't lucky?"

"Then they ended up like this guy," he said. "A small fire and a slow death. Lots of pain." He stopped prodding the man's skin and stepped back so that I could view the full extent of the damage done to his body.

"Steel melts at 2400 degrees," Digger told me. "Napalm burns at something between 1800 and 3600 degrees, depending on what you use to ignite it. It sticks to everything, so once it's on you, you can't get away from it. It only stops once it's burned itself out."

"And by then you're dead," I said.

"That's the kicker," said Digger. "Usually, you're not. You're just burned. It hurts like a son of a bitch, but you think maybe you'll live. Burns are funny like that. Unless they're really bad, you don't die right away. But what happens is, over the next couple of days you lose a lot of blood mass while your body tries to heal itself. And if you still don't die, then it starts eating up the infected parts and putting it all back into your blood, so you die that way."

"You think he lived a few days?" I asked.

Digger sighed. "I know he did. He and his buddy were out in the jungle doing God knows what, got surprised by a napalm burn the boys were doing around a place they thought the NVA might be using as a camp. He got splashed, but his buddy didn't. His friend got him away from the smoke, but he couldn't do anything about the burns. He held out four days. If you ask me, his buddy would have done him a favor to leave him in there."

"What can we do for him?"

 

"Not much. Clean him up a little. Get the worst of the gunk off. It's more to show his wife and kids that he was a kind of hero than anything else."

I looked around the room for any other bodies. "What else have we got?" I asked Digger. "He's it for now," he answered. "You want to skip this one? It's okay."
I looked at the dead man. I did want to leave. The savagery done to him by the napalm was

terrible to see, worse somehow than the usual gunshot wounds and even the grisly results of a mine or mortar hit. His body was simply blackened, the skin cracked like the skin of a roasted animal. I imagined him praying for death and wondering why it wouldn't come.

"I'll stay," I told Digger.

Together we washed the body, careful not to do further damage to the skin. Digger was right that there wasn't much we could do, but still I felt better as we cleaned away at least some of the napalm's black kisses. No one looking at the body would ever believe the man had died of anything other than unnatural causes, but in some small way I felt we were giving him back at least a little of his humanity by treating him as more than just a burned husk.