The Vietnam Reader (82 page)

peer down the sights of your M-16,
seeing the full moon
loaded on an oxcart.

The Dead at Quang Tri

This is harder than counting stones
along paths going nowhere, the way
a tiger circles & backtracks by
smelling his blood on the ground.
The one kneeling beside the pagoda,
remember him? Captain, we won’t
talk about that. The Buddhist boy
at the gate with the shaven head
we rubbed for luck
glides by like a white moon.
He won’t stay dead, dammit!
Blades aim for the family jewels;
the grass we walk on
won’t stay down.

Hanoi Hannah

Ray Charles!
His voice
calls from waist-high grass,
& we duck behind gray sandbags.
“Hello, Soul Brothers. Yeah,
Georgia’s also on my mind.”
Flares bloom over the trees.
“Here’s Hannah again.
Let’s see if we can’t
light her goddamn fuse
this time.” Artillery
shells carve a white arc
against dusk. Her voice rises
from a hedgerow on our left.
“It’s Saturday night in the States.
Guess what your woman’s doing tonight.
I think I’ll let Tina Turner
tell you, you homesick GIs.”
Howitzers buck like a herd
of horses behind concertina.
“You know you’re dead men,
don’t you? You’re dead
as King today in Memphis.
Boys, you’re surrounded by
General Tran Do’s division.”
Her knife-edge song cuts
deep as a sniper’s bullet.
“Soul Brothers, what you dying for?”
We lay down a white-klieg
trail of tracers. Phantom jets
fanout over the trees.
Artillery fire zeros in.
Her voice grows flesh
& we can see her falling
into words, a bleeding flower
no one knows the true name for.
“You’re lousy shots, GIs.”
Her laughter floats up
as though the airways are
buried under our feet.

Roll Call

Through rifle sights
we must’ve looked like crows
perched on a fire-eaten branch,
lined up for reveille, ready
to roll-call each M-16
propped upright
between a pair of jungle boots,
a helmet on its barrel
as if it were a man.
The perfect row aligned
with the chaplain’s cross
while a metallic-gray squadron
of sea gulls circled. Only
a few lovers have blurred
the edges of this picture.
Sometimes I can hear them
marching through the house,
closing the distance. All
the lonely beds take me back
to where we saluted those
five pairs of boots
as the sun rose against our faces.

Seeing in the Dark

The scratchy sound of skin
flicks works deeper & deeper,
as mortar fire colors the night
flesh tone. The corporal at the door
grins; his teeth shiny as raw pearl,
he stands with a fist of money,
happy to see infantrymen
from the boonies—men who know
more about dodging trip wires &
seeing in the dark than they do
about women. They’re in Shangri-la
gaping at washed-out images
thrown against a bedsheet.

We’re men ready to be fused
with ghost pictures, trying
to keep the faces we love
from getting shuffled
with those on the wall.
Is that Hawk’s tenor
coloring-in the next frame?
Three women on a round bed
coax in a German shepherd—
everything turns white as alabaster.
The picture flickers; the projector
goes dead, & we cuss the dark
& the cicadas’ heavy breath.

Tu Do Street

Music divides the evening.
I close my eyes & can see
men drawing lines in the dust.
America pushes through the membrane
of mist & smoke, & I’m a small boy
again in Bogalusa.
White Only
signs & Hank Snow. But tonight
I walk into a place where bar girls
fade like tropical birds. When
I order a beer, the mama-san
behind the counter acts as if she
can’t understand, while her eyes
skirt each white face, as Hank Williams
calls from the psychedelic jukebox.
We have played Judas where
only machine-gun fire brings us
together. Down the street
black GIs hold to their turf also.
An off-limits sign pulls me
deeper into alleys, as I look
for a softness behind these voices
wounded by their beauty & war.
Back in the bush at Dak To
& Khe Sanh, we fought
the brothers of these women
we now run to hold in our arms.
There’s more than a nation
inside us, as black & white
soldiers touch the same lovers
minutes apart, tasting
each other’s breath,
without knowing these rooms
run into each other like tunnels
leading to the underworld.

The Edge

When guns fall silent for an hour
or two, you can hear the cries

of women making love to soldiers.
They have an unmerciful memory

& know how to wear bright dresses
to draw a crowd, conversing

with a platoon of shadows
numbed by morphine. Their real feelings

make them break like April
into red blossoms.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreams
fire has singed the edges of,

they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.
Shimmering fans work against the heat

& smell of gunpowder, making money
float from hand to hand. The next moment

a rocket pushes a white fist
through night sky, & they scatter like birds

& fall into the shape their lives
have become.

“You want a girl, GI?”
“You buy me Saigon tea?”

Soldiers bring the scent of burning flesh
with them—on their clothes & in their hair,

drawn to faces in half-lit rooms.
As good-bye kisses are thrown

to the charred air, silhouettes of jets
ease over nude bodies on straw mats.

In Country
B
OBBIE
A
NN
M
ASON
1985

29

Moon Pie, lounging under Mrs. Biggs’s forsythia bush, yawned at Sam when she slammed the car door. Emmett was usually home at this time of day, fixing supper, but the door was locked. He wasn’t expecting her back from Mamaw’s until tomorrow. Luckily, she had a key with her. When she opened the door, a harsh, overpowering chemical smell rushed at her, instead of the usual stale smell of cigarettes. What in the hell? Emmett couldn’t have put his head in a gas oven, she thought. Their stove was electric. Her second thought was Agent Orange, although this didn’t smell like oranges. She gulped a deep breath of air from outside and rushed in. When she called “Emmett!” her air rushed out. She gulped some more fresh air and raced around downstairs, calling for him. Then she found the source of the smell. In the center of the living room, between the TV and the couch, a spray can had been set on a kitchen chair. She snatched it up and read the label. It was a flea bomb, one of those spray cans that could be locked in a spray position. It was empty now. Emmett had set off a flea bomb and left the house, as though he had thrown a hand grenade inside and run away. It was just like him to do something secretive like that, without even mentioning it. It made her furious. He was so paranoid about those fleas.

She paced up and down the porch and tried to think. She had opened both doors to get cross-ventilation. She was so angry she could
shit bricks. Then she had an idea. She went to the car and ripped a blank page out of her father’s diary. She wrote Emmett a note and left it on the refrigerator, under a tomato magnet. The note said, “You think you can get away with everything because you’re a V.N. vet, but you can’t. On the table is a diary my daddy kept. Mamaw gave it to me. Is that what it was like over there? If it was, then you can just forget about me. Don’t try to find me. You’re on your own now. Goodbye. Sam.”

Sam took a deep breath of fresh air and raced upstairs. The air in her room was tolerable. She opened the window, then searched the closet for her sleeping bag and backpack from Girl Scouts. She crammed some shorts and T-shirts into the pack, then grabbed some jeans and her cowboy boots. She got Emmett’s space blanket and poncho from his footlocker. Downstairs, with a new breath from outside, she searched for food to take with her. They didn’t have any ham and mother-fuckers, so she took pork and beans. G.I.s lived out of cans. They even had canned butter. She put a can of potted meat and some Doritos and granola bars in the pack, along with the Granny Cakes and the can of smoked oysters she had bought. She loaded a six-pack cooler with Pepsi and cheese and grape juice. She found some plastic utensils she had saved from the Burger Boy. Her job was supposed to start in two weeks. Where would she be in two weeks?

She imagined that the smell was Agent Orange. Her lungs were soaking up dioxin, and molecules of it were embedding themselves in the tissues, and someday it would come back to haunt her, like the foods that gave Emmett gas.

Probably dioxin wasn’t in flea bombs. But for all anyone knew, they could have a chemical just as deadly. Those chemical companies didn’t care.

On the way out of town, she had the appalling thought that Moon Pie might have sneaked back in the house. But she was almost sure he was still under that bush when she pulled out of the driveway.

If men went to war for women, and for unborn generations, then she was going to find out what they went through. Sam didn’t think the women or the unborn babies had any say in it. If it were up to women, there wouldn’t be any war. No, that was a naive thought.
When women got power, they were just like men. She thought of Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher. She wouldn’t want to meet those women out in the swamp at night.

What would make people want to kill? If the U.S.A. sent her to a foreign country, with a rifle and a heavy backpack, could she root around in the jungle, sleep in the mud, and shoot at strangers? How did the Army get boys to do that? Why was there war?

Her dad had no sense of humor. At least Emmett had a sense of humor. Dwayne couldn’t spell, and his handwriting was bad.

Emmett’s fear of fleas was silly. Sam wasn’t even afraid of spending the night at Cawood’s Pond, sleeping out on the ground. Cawood’s Pond was so dangerous even the Boy Scouts wouldn’t camp out there, but it was the last place in western Kentucky where a person could really face the wild. That was what she wanted to do.

Along the secondary road leading to the pond, bulldozers had been at work, dredging the outer reaches of the swamp. Sam drove up the bumpy lane and left the car in the center of the clearing. Her shoes crunched on the gravel. Down the path to the boardwalk, she paused at a stump. Inside the hollow, a million tiny black ants were working on a bit of plastic, ripping it up into nonbiodegradable tidbits and marching off with it. Emmett imagined the fleas were like that, crawling all over him while he slept. She thought he must have been having a flashback when he tossed in the flea-bomb grenade and ran away. The fleas were the Vietnamese. How often had she heard the enemy soldiers compared to ants, or other creatures too numerous to count? She remembered someone saying that the G.I.s would fight for a position and gain it and then the next day there would be a thousand more of the enemy swarming around them.

The Vietnamese used anything the Americans threw away—bomb casings and cigarette butts and helicopter parts and Coke cans. It was like Emmett rigging up things in the house. It was Vietnamese behavior, she thought, making do with what he could scrounge. The Vietnamese could make a bomb out of a Coke can.