The Vietnam Reader (58 page)

S
ERGEANT
: Ten-HUT! (The company springs up, C
APTAIN
departs down center aisle.) Take your seats! (The company falls down.)

Lights dim, film begins, images burn through the screen: bursting bombs, dying French, gleaming conference tables, scowling Dulles, golf-shirted Ike, stolid Diem shaking head, Green Berets from the sky, four stars at Kennedy’s ear, charred Buddhists, scurrying troops, Dallas, Dallas, destroyers shuddering, Marines in surf, napalm eggs, dour Johnson: let us reason, come let us reason, plunging jets, columns of smoke, beaming Mao, B-52s, UH-lAs, 105s, M-16s, Nuremberg cheers, jack-booted Fuehrer, grinning peasants, rubber-sandaled Ho,
Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Adolph Hider, Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh …

Someone flipped a switch and the darkness exploded into geometry. Spheres of light overhead illuminated the angles and planes of an enormous rectangular room. Two rows of bunks faced one another in mirrored perfection and on the last bunk of the left row, a warp in the symmetry, one body, male, inert, semiconscious.

GRIFFIN, JAMES 1
. 451 55 0366
SP
4 P96D2T

USARV TRANS DET APO SF
96384

“Hey, numbnuts, wake up!” yelled a voice slurred with drink. “There’s a goddamn war out there.”

The lights went rapidly on and off, on and off.

Griffin’s eyes blinked once, twice, then closed in defense against the naked one-hundred-watt bulb he could feel even through shut lids bombarding him from above. Planetary-sized spots bloomed on his retina, slid back and forth, black holes in his vision. He hated being awakened like this. It was too sudden, too brutal, it was like being hit on the head from behind. It made him uneasy, subject to disturbing, revelatory thoughts. This is how you will die, said such an interruption, not in the comfortable tranquillity you have always imagined as a natural right, but violently, in shock and confusion, far from home, without preparation or kindness, rudely extinguished by an unexpected light much bigger than your own.

Then a mortar round fell out of the sky into the roof directly over his head.

In the super slow motion of television sports reports Griffin saw the underside slope of the roof shiver into a pattern of stress lines, bow, change color, and had the time to think even this: the barracks is a beer can and we’re about to be opened before his eyes and everything in them fizzed up and whooshed out into the warm foreign night. He didn’t have time to scream. The smoking rubble of morning yielded one charred finger and a handful of blackened molars

a flap of skin and a torn nail
a left ear, a right hoof
a hambone and the yolk of an eye

He could never decide how to finish. Real death was a phenomenon at once so sober and so silly his imagination tended to go flat attempting comprehension. Like everyone else he was able to picture possibilities. The gathered parts, the body bag, the flagged casket, grief, tears, the world going tritely on, the war too, the sky above an untarnished blue. These were generalities, accurate but lacking the satisfaction of the personal detail. Griffin believed that there existed a proper sequence of final events, which when imagined correctly would give off a click, dim the room, and shut down at last that section of his brain which worked for the other side. Meanwhile, he would learn how to handle these terrible rehearsals that rushed in on him from nowhere. Maybe they were valuable learning experiences. Maybe layers of protective hide were being sewn onto his character. Maybe when the time came he would be brave when bravery was required, calm when there was an excess of panic. He didn’t really know. Nor did he know where or when he might encounter real death, but he was sure he didn’t ever want to die in a place where in the corner two drunks argued in loud whispers over the juiciest way to fuck a gook pussy.

When you go they put you in a shed there until the computer finishes its shuffle, marked cards, shaved deck, jokers all around. Griffin remained in bed. He chose to pass.

“Got no slots for mattress testers,” they said. “We gonna place you in a right tasty location, way up north maybe, where the only lying down is of a permanent nature, heehee.”

“Do I get a pillow?” asked Griffin. Hoho.

In the bunk to his right was a randy adolescent ripe with virginal fantasies of wartime sex. He spent hours leafing through pornographic pictures reading the good parts aloud. On Griffin’s left a twenty-six-year-old baker from Buffalo, New York, who had already received his
orders directed a feverish monologue to the ceiling while scratching anxiously at his groin: “I won’t go I tell you, no way, I won’t go, they’ll have to drag me out of here, those people are animals, fucking animals, they
like
to pull triggers, bayonet babies, I’ve seen the pictures, strings of ears on a wire, Christ! can you imagine that, what kind of person walks around wearing an ear necklace for God’s sake, who would have believed it, airborne, me airborne, why me, huh? there must be thousands of guys itching to go airborne, run around like baboons and get blown away, well I’m the winner, I’m the goddamn lucky winner. I don’t need this, I got a wife and two kids, I’ll shoot myself in the foot first, I’m not gonna get killed for a bunch of crazy glory hounds, that’s insane, know what I mean, fucking sick, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?”

Griffin pulled the sheet up over his head. He lay quite still and soon felt himself sinking into an immense bowl of vanilla pudding. It was peaceful and quiet on the bottom, submerged and fetal. From the surface the slow mournful sound of a distant radio filtered down like weary shafts of sun through an unruffled sea:

When the train left the station
It had two lights on behind.
The blue light was my blues
And the red light was my mind.

The song faded to be instantly replaced by the manic voice of a Top Forty disc jockey: “This is AFVN, the American Forces Vietnam Network broadcasting from our Tower of Power in Saigon with studios and transmitters in Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, Pleiku, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, and Quang Tri.”

My God, thought Griffin in astonishment. I really am in Vietnam.

He had been in the country for two weeks.

MEDITATION IN GREEN: 2

What can go wrong: ants

anthracnose

aphids

Botrytis

caterpillars

chlorosis

cockroaches

compacted soil

crickets

crown and stem rot cutworms

damping-off disease

earthworms

earwigs

fungus

gnats

improper lighting

improper soil pH

improper temperature

improper watering

insufficient humidity

leaf miners

leaf rollers

leaf spots

mealybugs

mildew

millipedes

mold

nematodes nutrient

deficiencies

Paco’s Story
L
ARRY
H
EINEMANN
1986

1. The First Clean Fact.
Let’s begin with the first clean fact, James: This ain’t no war story. War stories are out—one, two, three, and a heave-ho, into the lake you go with all the other alewife scuz and foamy harbor scum. But isn’t it a pity. All those crinkly, soggy sorts of laid-by tellings crowded together as thick and pitiful as street cobbles, floating mushy bellies up, like so much moldy shag rug (dead as rusty-ass doornails and smelling so peculiar and un-Christian). Just isn’t it a pity, because here and there and yonder among the corpses are some prize-winning, leg-pulling daisies—some real pop-in-the-oven muffins, so to speak, some real softly lobbed, easy-out line drives.

But that’s the way of the world, or so the fairy tales go. The people with the purse strings and apron strings gripped in their hot and soft little hands denounce war stones—with perfect diction and practiced gestures—as a geek-monster species of evil-ugly rumor. (A geek, James, is a carnival performer whose whole act consists of biting the head off a live chicken or a snake.) These people who denounce war stories stand bolt upright and proclaim with broad and timely sweeps of the arm that war stories put
other
folks to sleep where they sit. (When the contrary is more to the truth, James. Any carny worth his cashbox—not dead or in jail or squirreled away in some county nuthouse—will tell you that most folks will shell out hard-earned, greenback cash, every time, to see artfully performed, urgently fascinating, grisly and gruesome carnage.)

Other people (getting witty and spry, floor-of-the-Senate, let-me-read-this-here-palaver-into-the-
Congressional-Record
, showboat oratorical) slip one hand under a vest flap and slide one elegantly spit-shined wing-tip shoe forward ever so clever, and swear and be
damned
if all that snoring at war stories doesn’t rattle windows for miles around—all the way to Pokorneyville, or so the papers claim. (Pokorneyville, James, is a real place, you understand, a little bit of a town between Wheeling and Half Day at the junction of U.S. route 12 and Aptakisic Road—a Texaco gas station, a Swedish bakery, and Don’t Drive Bed-die-Bye Motel.)