The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named
Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were
not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded
in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a
day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen,
unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the
last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips
into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste
the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than
anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters
were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he
was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she
wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm
exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia
Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war,
except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10
ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross
understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what
he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the
letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move
among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would
return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among
the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives,
heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum,
candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches,
sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three
canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20
pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry
Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially
fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen,
who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and
several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia.
Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in
the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and
because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds
including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard
fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet
they carried jungle boots—2.1 pounds—and Dave Jensen carried three
pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution
against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7
ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell
Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat
Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated
New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught
Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad
times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the
white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated.
Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each
man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed
6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you
could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress
bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights
were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green
plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or
makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2
pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted
Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry
him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him
away.
They were called legs or grunts.
To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross
humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its
intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied
burdens far beyond the intransitive.
Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross
carried two photographs of Martha. The first was a Kodacolor snapshot
signed Love, though he knew better. She stood against a brick wall. Her
eyes were gray and neutral, her lips slightly open as she stared straighton
at the camera. At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who
had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he
loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picturetaker
spreading out against the brick wall. The second photograph had
been clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook. It was an action
shot—women's volleyball—and Martha was bent horizontal to the floor,
reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the
expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore
white gym shorts. Her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of
a virgin, dry and without hair, the left knee cocked and carrying her
entire weight, which was just over 100 pounds. Lieutenant Cross
remembered touching that left knee. A dark theater, he remembered,
and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt,
and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and
looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but
he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee
beneath it and the sound of the gunfire that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how
embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing
her good night at the dorm door. Right then, he thought, he should've
done something brave. He should've carried her up the stairs to her room
and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He
should've risked it. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought
of new things he should've done.
What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field
specialty.
As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a
compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that
weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the
responsibility for the lives of his men.
As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, 26
pounds with its battery.
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and
plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the
things a medic must carry, including M&M's for especially bad wounds,
for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds.
As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the
M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always
loaded. In addition, Dobbins carried between 10 and 15 pounds of
ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders.
As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried
the standard M-16 gas-operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5
pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine.
Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the
riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth
bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at
maximum. When it was available, they also carried M-16 maintenance
gear—rods and steel brushes and swabs and tubes of LSA oil—all of
which weighed about a pound. Among the grunts, some carried the M-79
grenade launcher, 5.9 pounds unloaded, a reasonably light weapon
except for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round weighed 10
ounces. The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was
scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe,
and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of
ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and
toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear.
He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw
it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or
something—just boom, then down—not like the movies where the dead
guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle—not
like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down.
Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. Lieutenant Cross felt
the pain. He blamed himself. They stripped off Lavender's canteens and
ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat Kiley said the obvious, the guy's
dead, and Mitchell Sanders used his radio to report one U.S. KIA and to
request a chopper. Then they wrapped Lavender in his poncho. They
carried him out to a dry paddy, established security, and sat smoking the
dead man's dope until the chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to
himself. He pictured Martha's smooth young face, thinking he loved her
more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was
dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about
her. When the dustoff arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward
they burned Than Khe. They marched until dusk, then dug their holes,
and that night Kiowa kept explaining how you had to be there, how fast it
was, how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete. Boom-down,
he said. Like cement.
In addition to the three standard weapons—the M-60, M-16, and M-
79—they carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed
appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-as-
catch-can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14s and
CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47s and ChiComs
and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis and .38-
caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWs and shotguns and
silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee
Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell
Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his grandfather's
feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore
antipersonnel mine—3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried
fragmentation grenades—14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-
18 colored smoke grenade—24 ounces. Some carried CS or tear gas
grenades. Some carried white phosphorus grenades. They carried all they
could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power
of the things they carried.
In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy
Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble,
an ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky white color with
flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the
accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the
Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide,
where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-buttogether
quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble
and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed
weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her
truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he
wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by
separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come
into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw
the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare
feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would
be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber
like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had
been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving
along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It
was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved
her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he
carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea
salt and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his
attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out
the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into
daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore,
with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and
waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.
What they carried varied by mission.
When a mission took them to the mountains, they carried mosquito
netting, machetes, canvas tarps, and extra bug juice.
If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they
knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily
mined AOs, where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and Bouncing
Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine detector. With its
headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the
lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of
the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety,
partly for the illusion of safety.
On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds
and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of
moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in
carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would
never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's candy. Until he
was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6.3
pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his
girlfriend's pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all
carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file across
the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they
would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night
waiting.
Other missions were more complicated and required special
equipment. In mid-April, it was their mission to search out and destroy
the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai.
To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high
explosives, four blocks to a man, 68 pounds in all. They carried wiring,
detonators, and battery-powered clackers. Dave Jensen carried earplugs.
Most often, before blowing the tunnels, they were ordered by higher
command to search them, which was considered bad news, but by and
large they just shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a big
man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel duty. The others would
draw numbers. Before Lavender died there were 17 men in the platoon,
and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and crawl in
headfirst with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross's .45-caliber pistol. The
rest of them would fan out as security. They would sit down or kneel, not
facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining
cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls
squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand
and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in
all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a
swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd
things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you
screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it?
Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though
not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was
a killer.
On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number 17, he laughed and
muttered something and went down quickly. The morning was hot and
very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel opening, then
out across a dry paddy toward the village of Than Khe. Nothing moved.
No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank
Kool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also
feeling the luck of the draw. You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell
Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line
and no one laughed.
Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a
tranquilizer and went off to pee.
After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel,
leaned down, and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought—a cave-in
maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about
Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them
buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling,
watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all
the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he
wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be
smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He
wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why
that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding
her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria—even
dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with
love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and
looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss
without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes,
just flat and uninvolved.
Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was
buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were
pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was
smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen
paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of
security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was
twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it.
A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel. He came
up grinning, filthy but alive. Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes
while the others clapped Strunk on the back and made jokes about rising
from the dead.
Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave. Fuckin' zombie.
The men laughed. They all felt great relief.
Spook city, said Mitchell Sanders.
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very
happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning
sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the
head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth
were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye.
The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The
guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound—the guy's dead. I
mean really.
The things they carried were determined to some extent by
superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen
carried a rabbit's foot. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person,
carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell
Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed
4 ounces at most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or
sixteen. They'd found him at the bottom of an irrigation ditch, badly
burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy wore black shorts and
sandals. At the time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a
rifle, and three magazines of ammunition.
You want my opinion, Mitchell Sanders said, there's a definite moral
here.
He put his hand on the dead boy's wrist. He was quiet for a time, as if
counting a pulse, then he patted the stomach, almost affectionately, and
used Kiowa's hunting hatchet to remove the thumb.
Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was.
Moral?
You know. Moral.
Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to
Norman Bowker. There was no blood. Smiling, he kicked the boy's head,
watched the flies scatter, and said, It's like with that old TV show—
Paladin. Have gun, will travel.
Henry Dobbins thought about it.
Yeah, well, he finally said. I don't see no moral.
There it Is, man.
Fuck off.
They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried
Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades,
chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling
Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail
clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a
week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in
green mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda
pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a 2-gallon capacity.
Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special
occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave Jensen
carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection.
Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common.
Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which
weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory.
They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each
other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess
sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank,
Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of
Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery.
They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various
rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the
soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues
and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it,
the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they
carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire,
at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless
march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They
marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly,
leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple
grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the
paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one
step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because
it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of
posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind
of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope
and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their
calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission.
They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring,
kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels,
sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving
on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the
same. They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the
heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak
jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the
strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely
for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and
grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would
arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh
watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen
sweaters—the resources were stunning—sparklers for the Fourth of July,
colored eggs for Easter—it was the great American war chest—the fruits
of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the
Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat—
they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and
shoulders—and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and
unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would
never be at a loss for things to carry.
After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led
his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot
chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery
and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours through
the hot afternoon, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how
Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling.
He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed 5
pounds, he began digging a hole in the earth.
He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his
men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was
something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest
of the war.
All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax,
slashing, feeling both love and hate, and then later, when it was full dark,
he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while.
In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha,
and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not
quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in
New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized
she did not love him and never would.
Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I swear to God—boom,
down. Not a word.
I've heard this, said Norman Bowker.
A pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping.
All right, fine. That's enough.
Yeah, but you had to see it, the guy just—
I heard, man. Cement. So why not shut the fuck up?
Kiowa shook his head sadly and glanced over at the hole where
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross sat watching the night. The air was thick and
wet. A warm dense fog had settled over the paddies and there was the
stillness that precedes rain.
After a time Kiowa sighed.
One thing for sure, he said. The lieutenant's in some deep hurt. I mean
that crying jag—the way he was carrying on—it wasn't fake or anything, it
was real heavy-duty hurt. The man cares.
Sure, Norman Bowker said.
Say what you want, the man does care.
We all got problems.
Not Lavender.
No, I guess not, Bowker said. Do me a favor, though.
Shut up?
That's a smart Indian. Shut up.
Shrugging, Kiowa pulled off his boots. He wanted to say more, just to
lighten up his sleep, but instead he opened his New Testament and
arranged it beneath his head as a pillow. The fog made things seem
hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but
then he was thinking how fast it was, no drama, down and dead, and how
it was hard to feel anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He
wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion
wasn't there and he couldn't make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be
alive. He liked the smell of the New Testament under his cheek, the
leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the chemicals were. He
liked hearing the sounds of night. Even his fatigue, it felt fine, the stiff
muscles and the prickly awareness of his own body, a floating feeling. He
enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy
Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted
to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he
could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of
having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil
and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.
After a moment Norman Bowker sat up in the dark.
What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell it to me.
Forget it.
No, man, go on. One thing I hate, it's a silent Indian.
For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity.
Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed
or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning
sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around
on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and
begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to
themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to
die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the
firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their
bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force
themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world
would take on the old logic—absolute silence, then the wind, then
sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the
men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups,
becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They
would check for casualties, call in dustoffs, light cigarettes, try to smile,
clear their throats and spit and begin cleaning their weapons. After a
time someone would shake his head and say, No lie, I almost shit my
pants, and someone else would laugh, which meant it was bad, yes, but
the guy had obviously not shit his pants, it wasn't that bad, and in any
case nobody would ever do such a thing and then go ahead and talk
about it. They would squint into the dense, oppressive sunlight. For a few
moments, perhaps, they would fall silent, lighting a joint and tracking its
passage from man to man, inhaling, holding in the humiliation. Scary
stuff, one of them might say. But then someone else would grin or flick
his eyebrows and say, Roger-dodger, almost cut me a new asshole,
almost.
There were numerous such poses. Some carried themselves with a sort
of wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or
good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were even
more afraid to show it.
They found jokes to tell.
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased
they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just
stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite
dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had
their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because
they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of
death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt
lingo. They told stories about Ted Lavender's supply of tranquilizers,
how the poor guy didn't feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was.
There's a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders.
They were waiting for Lavender's chopper, smoking the dead man's
dope.
The moral's pretty obvious, Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from
drugs. No joke, they'll ruin your day every time.
Cute, said Henry Dobbins.
Mind blower, get it? Talk about wiggy. Nothing left, just blood and
brains.
They made themselves laugh.
There it is, they'd say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it
is—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy
and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be
cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be
changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.
They were tough.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief,
terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had
their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They
carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of
cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in
many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be
put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried
their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the
fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed
not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place,
nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of
dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled
into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each morning,
despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They
kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was
simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to
the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge
until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that
would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter
of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was
not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of
composure. They sneered at sick call. They spoke bitterly about guys who
had found release by shooting off their own toes or fingers. Pussies,
they'd say. Candy-asses. It was fierce, mocking talk, with only a trace of
envy or awe, but even so the image played itself out behind their eyes.
They imagined the muzzle against flesh. So easy: squeeze the trigger
and blow away a toe. They imagined it. They imagined the quick, sweet
pain, then the evacuation to Japan, then a hospital with warm beds and
cute geisha nurses.
And they dreamed of freedom birds.
At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by
jumbo jets. They felt the rush of takeoff. Gone! they yelled. And then
velocity—wings and engines—a smiling stewardess—but it was more than
a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons
and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was
nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of
wind and altitude, soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone!—they were
naked, they were light and free—it was all lightness, bright and fast and
buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in the
lungs as they were taken up over the clouds and the war, beyond duty,
beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements—Sin loi! they
yelled. I'm sorry, motherfuckers, but I'm out of it, I'm goofed, I'm on a
space cruise, I'm gone!—and it was a restful, unencumbered sensation,
just riding the light waves, sailing that big silver freedom bird over the
mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping
cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald's,
it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher,
spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the
vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything
weighed exactly nothing—Gone! they screamed. I'm sorry but I'm
gone!—and so at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves over to
lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne.
On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy
Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters.
Then he burned the two photographs. There was a steady rain falling,
which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and Sterno to build a small
fire, screening it with his body, holding the photographs over the tight
blue flame with the tips of his fingers.
He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too,
but mostly just stupid.
Lavender was dead. You couldn't burn the blame.
Besides, the letters were in his head. And even now, without
photographs, Lieutenant Cross could see Martha playing volleyball in her
white gym shorts and yellow T-shirt. He could see her moving in the
rain.
When the fire died out, Lieutenant Cross pulled his poncho over his
shoulders and ate breakfast from a can.
There was no great mystery, he decided.
In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except
to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. She wasn't involved. She signed the
letters Love, but it wasn't love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did
not matter. Virginity was no longer an issue. He hated her. Yes, he did.
He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.
The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything seemed part of
everything else, the fog and Martha and the deepening rain.
He was a soldier, after all.
Half smiling, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross took out his maps. He shook his
head hard, as if to clear it, then bent forward and began planning the
day's march. In ten minutes, or maybe twenty, he would rouse the men
and they would pack up and head west, where the maps showed the
country to be green and inviting. They would do what they had always
done. The rain might add some weight, but otherwise it would be one
more day layered upon all the other days.
He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach.
He loved her but he hated her.
No more fantasies, he told himself.
Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think
that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This
was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there were no
pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of
carelessness and gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you
were dead, never partly dead.
Briefly, in the rain, Lieutenant Cross saw Martha's gray eyes gazing
back at him. He understood.
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things
men did or felt they had to do.
He almost nodded at her, but didn't.
Instead he went back to his maps. He was now determined to perform
his duties firmly and without negligence. It wouldn't help Lavender, he
knew that, but from this point on he would comport himself as an officer.
He would dispose of his good-luck pebble. Swallow it, maybe, or use Lee
Strunk's slingshot, or just drop it along the trail. On the march he would
impose strict field discipline. He would be careful to send out flank
security, to prevent straggling or bunching up, to keep his troops moving
at the proper pace and at the proper interval. He would insist on clean
weapons. He would confiscate the remainder of Lavender's dope. Later
in the day, perhaps, he would call the men together and speak to them
plainly. He would accept the blame for what had happened to Ted
Lavender. He would be a man about it. He would look them in the eyes,
keeping his chin level, and he would issue the new SOPs in a calm,
impersonal tone of voice, a lieutenant's voice, leaving no room for
argument or discussion. Commencing immediately, he'd tell them, they
would no longer abandon equipment along the route of march. They
would police up their acts. They would get their shit together, and keep it
together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.
He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing
himself.
Among the men there would be grumbling, of course, and maybe
worse, because their days would seem longer and their loads heavier, but
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to
be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a
factor. And if anyone quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten
his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture. He
might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He might just shrug and
say, Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and
move out toward the villages west of Than Khe.
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