by Chris Lynch
“Nobody’s happy, Bug. Get it together, man.”
“Does it not bother you, to do the things you do?”
“I don’t do anything but what I’m supposed to do. What I’m trained to do. What I’m paid to do. Same as everybody else. Same as you.”
“No. Not same as me. Not at all same as me.”
“Right,” he says. Then turns away, to head downhill with the rest of them. “Whatever you say, Mr. Good.”
I remain frozen for several seconds more, rigid with rage. Lopez has walked to just about the same spot where he turned around last time.
Then, the freeze wears off. But the rage does nothing of the kind.
I rasp-roar like a mountain lion as I leap from the chopper and hurtle down the path toward him. I am hunting him like a lion, too, as I raise my claws just in time to catch him whirling around to confront me.
The immediate racket we make is both frightening and comical. With all the gear we both have strapped to our torsos, we sound something like a miniature car crash on impact. Rifles, pistols, knives, and canteens line up and smash up so well, we could be wearing suits of armor. Add to that my camera gear that punches into my chest hardest of all, and Lopez’s dangling hand grenades, and we are lucky to avoid death on impact.
But it doesn’t feel lucky. There’s probably fifty feet of partially cleared, woody, scrubby trail leading from the landing pad down to the edge of the camp. And Lopez and I bang into every bump and stump along the way while we punch and kick and throttle the life out of each other.
Between the gear, the fists, the boots, the knees and elbows, the accelerated and compressed epic battle we wage before reaching bottom reminds me of fighting both of my brothers at once, if they were also highly trained and armed like ninja cowboys.
I’ve got position as we finally stop tumbling and reach bottom. I have Lopez pinned to the dirt with my left hand squeezing his throat. My right is cocked and coming for his nose.
Only it’s my nose that takes the impact. This should not surprise me, as Lopez and I have fought a bunch of times, starting with our first week of training. He’s lightning quick, with fists like compacted gravel. He’s also fearless and tireless and, probably most important of all, doesn’t seem to care one little bit about being punched in the face.
Good for him, because now I’m punching him repeatedly. We’ve both shaken away most of our gear, and are bare-knuckling it all around the edge of the camp. Bunches of guys have come over to watch and not do anything about it. Partly because there is a sort of let the boys settle it understanding around here, and partly because nothing much happens in camp for long stretches and guys need the entertainment.
There’s a sort of growling murmur all around us in place of the lunkhead barking and screaming that would surround a fight in a normal place. We have to always be aware of calling too much attention to ourselves, no matter what the circumstances. Though it’s never seemed more absurd than it does in this case. Every guy here wants to erupt in loud, violent appreciation of the animal behavior before them. But they’re only allowed to produce the equivalent of a trumpet with a mute at the end of it, or a pistol with a silencer.
“How, Gust?” I plead while trying to bounce his thick skull off the ground. “I thought I knew you. How is it possible to do something like that?”
“Bug,” he says very calmly for a person in his compromised position, “you are all the way out of your mind. I did, we did, what needed to be done.”
Before I can say another word, he flips me with such ease and authority that I could just as well be a practice dummy.
He has me flat on my back, and I accept it. I look up into his wide, soft, confusing eyes, and try to make more sense of him, of us, of everything, than I am able to do.
“That elephant never did anything to you, Gust,” I say wearily.
I can feel the beat of his heart as forcefully as I feel my own. We are breathing hard, but not yet spent. Our muscles are strained to the point of trembling, but not yet tapped out. It would appear that maximum fitness training is not without its drawbacks.
“That is what made you mental?” he asks, with enough obvious shock that I momentarily wonder about myself.
“Yeah,” I say, thinking right now that that is the true answer. “I think so, anyway.”
Our contribution to the camp’s amusement seems to have worn itself out. As Lopez and I move from the kind of punches that are enjoyable to spectators and settle into the kind of internal, mental stuff that only we can see, the crowd drifts away.
“I thought you were flipping out because we failed to keep Garvine from getting killed,” he says, still casually sitting on top of me as we talk. “Or because we just shot a bunch of girls to smithereens,” he adds, helpfully.
What? We did those things? We did what?
“What?”
As I ask that, Gustavo Lopez, probably my best friend in this world, seems to finally be drained of his remaining strength. He stares down at me with a thoughtful, worried expression. Then, he falls forward and his forehead crunches the bridge of my nose with possibly the most direct hit of the day.
Daniel,
You know I have been uneasy for some time. I worry about you. I worry about not knowing. I worry about what I see in the news and what seems to be an alarming turn of events in the political situation here and the aggression and geopolitical situation where you are.
Which brings me to the question of where you are.
Daniel, when I believed you were in Thailand I was relatively comforted by that thought, because everyplace else in that part of the world seemed more dangerous. Despite the fact that I had to work hard to believe you, that was still some comfort.
Do you remember Father Marcotte? From the parish? He’s over there, as you may know. And, well, Father Marcotte is sure that he saw you in a place called Chu Lai. He said he was in a moving vehicle while you were walking through the camp, otherwise he would have spoken to you. Still, he was certain it was you. Sure enough that he told his mother so.
Priests do not lie to their mothers, Daniel, as you know.
I suppose I’m wishing you were a priest right now, rather than a soldier, so that at least I could get the truth.
No, that is a lie. I wish you were neither.
See, that’s the thing about lying. It gets contagious.
I love you. I miss you. I worry for you, son.
Write me something I can use?
Love,
Dad
PS The boys say they have only just now gotten all of your smell out of the house. They’re just being wise guys. I know better. I can still smell you everywhere.
It can be hard to keep up with correspondence, under my current circumstances. But there are some letters that demand immediate attention. Unless you’re a complete rat of a son.
Dear Dad,
“A moving vehicle.” He said so himself. A MOVING vehicle. How can anybody, even a priest, have the power to tell one grunt from a thousand other grunts—when really they all look basically like me anyway—from a vehicle traveling at speed, over an almost certainly rutted and cratered road, under the stressful air base conditions in present-day Vietnam? Which, as I understand from hearing others talk, are much more stressful than anything encountered in Thailand.
While I would never question the honesty of Father Marcotte, or any other priest or their mothers, I don’t think it is out of line to question the accuracy of what he thinks he might have seen.
Things are incredibly busy right now, but I promise I’ll sit down soon when I have the time to write a longer letter. In the meantime, please do your best not to worry about me, because I really am fine and have every intention of remaining so.
Meantime, meantime, here is something you can use, as requested. I’m enclosing another elephant picture. I’m taking as many of those as I can. Because I discovered something about myself here, and that is how much I absolutely love elephants. I never had any idea. That has to
be a good thing, right? Any guy who can love elephants has to be a quality human being, don’t you think, Dad?
And I probably never would have figured this out if I didn’t come to a place like this, one of the few places where you can see elephants outside a zoo or a circus.
Which, by the way, I never, ever want to see again. But I won’t have to, because I’m going to bring one home with me to keep. Tell those rotten brothers of mine, if they think I created a stench before, they ain’t smelled nothin’ yet.
Love,
Danny
There. I think I got through it without technically telling any lies at all.
Except maybe just one. And, by the way, it involved priests, not elephants.
My film development lab is basically a carbon copy of the camp latrine that it sits uncomfortably close to. There are days—hot, downwind days—when the scents wafting up from the chemical bath used to process the film serve the extra purpose of preserving my will to live.
Today is not one of those days. It’s raining steadily, and aside from the comforting red light inside and the grinding of jeeps fighting through mud outside, I’m not receiving any sensory signals—other than the ones coming up off of the photographs.
But there are plenty of those.
Elephants, of course. Birds alighting onto trees. Snakes and trucks and bicycles and goats. Big guns pulled by small people down a modest stretch of a modest miracle called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. All of these images float up to me out of the chemical soup I work with.
And all of them surprise me.
There is, of course, not a single image I haven’t seen before, since I took every shot myself. But that was before. Everything is different from before, I’m learning. Every now is different from every before. Every image looks like something new when I develop it, compared to what I saw in the viewfinder. And every image looks different on a second viewing and different again on a third and a fourth.
Sometimes I blame the autowinder. Because I can press a button and keep on shooting. Things that are too fast for me to see and record and comprehend in my own head, the photo equipment can capture so easily.
Other times I decide it’s a contest, a conflict between the two pieces of photo equipment that has nothing to do with me at all. The viewfinder and the autowinder. Viewfinder versus autowinder. One of them wants to see, and the other one wants to move right along as fast as possible and never linger over anything.
The autowinder only runs in one direction. Once you’ve viewfound and autowound, you can’t go back. You can’t autowind things in reverse and unview the views, no matter how badly you might want to.
Like now.
I’m developing the latest set of prints. Blooming into view, like ghosts, are the people repairing the road our guys had already destroyed once, reviving the antiaircraft artillery we sidelined. I see them, heads down, raking and hoeing and shoveling the fresh road all smooth. Then I see the truck back its way around the bend, to deposit the road materials that those guys will work like crazy beavers to smooth out again before it returns.
Girls, that is. Not guys. Including, I see now in the images swimming before me, the shooters. Crouched behind, or beside … No, crouched within the antiaircraft guns at either end of the work party, entwined in the gear, melded to it, are two snipers. Sniper girls.
I should have seen them the first time. Seeing things, recording what I see, noticing the details and reporting them to somebody—that is, above everything else, my assignment here. Maybe somebody else could have seen them, too, but I’m the one who should have seen them. I am the one who had to see them, the one who was counted on to see them.
But I didn’t, until now. I didn’t see them when I could have done any good, when I could have possibly saved Garvine a bullet and a box.
I can see clearly now. I can see everything and more.
I’m getting a little bombed out myself now, as I witness the indisputable reality of what I had hoped was not real. The pictures of those girls come floating up at me, out of the chemicals, out of the bath, faster than I can keep up. Somehow there’s a smiling group picture, as they all look up at me over their simple farm implements. Somehow there are individual closeup portraits, like high school graduation photos, even though they all look like freshmen or sophomores to me. Somehow, I can see the shots I missed, the shots I didn’t have time for, after Col. Macias ordered me to stop shooting pictures and start shooting people. I can see the shots I would have shot, after the gunfire stopped and the scrambling away started, up the hill and to the pickup zone.
They keep floating up to me, even when I’m not feeding any more film into the process. I see them all, hardworking and human, small and serious and smiling. Deadly and industrious and efficient. And focused.
Focused on me now.
The two girls I killed, the two I know for certain that I killed myself, shot and shot until they died and then shot some more until pieces flew off of them and then I shot those pieces and the pieces died. I can see them before I shot them, and I can see them as they are being shot by me. I can see them falling and crawling and sprawling. I can see them screaming, because you can see screams at least as clearly as you can hear them.
And I see them dead. Impossibly dead, remarkably clear and close. They’ve separated in their scramble. One had turned to the other when the first one died, with her eyes open and her tongue hanging out and touching the mud. The one behind has her hand on her comrade’s shoulder, as if she’d tackled her. Her eyes are closed, but her mouth is open—along the side, where my bullets have ripped her cheek and exposed her teeth.
It should come as more of a surprise than it does that I can see this all so clearly, the images right there in the bath before me. Somehow it doesn’t. But the part that does catch me off guard is that they’re facing my direction, as if they were scrambling toward me instead of away.
* * *
I have no idea how long it is that I am staring down, hanging my head and contributing my own goop to the soup of the chemical bath, when I hear a knock.
“Red light’s on,” I say. “When the red light’s on, it means keep out.”
“Daniel, I don’t care if the red light is on or the Blue Moon of Kentucky,” Col. Macias says gruffly. “You have ten minutes to close up your little office and get geared up. Meet me at the chopper pad.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, knowing that those are the only two acceptable words in response.
* * *
Eleven minutes later I’m sitting in my seat behind the Huey’s copilot. I ran to my hootch, collected my camera equipment and my killing equipment, working up a healthy sweat, which mixed nicely with the rain as I sprinted to catch my ride. I didn’t see any of the other guys on my way, so I figured that meant I was the last man to make it.
Which I was. But there were only the four of us: pilot, copilot, Col. Macias, and me.
“We have had a report of some unexpected movement along the trail,” Macias says as I look at him with obvious confusion.
“Okay,” I say. The chopper has lifted off, and we are powering over the trees, low enough that we can hear the tallest branches catching on the skids. “How come it’s just us, though?”
The colonel sighs and looks out the window on his side of the bird.
“Do you remember, Manion, back when you didn’t used to question me? Do you remember those days? I remember those days, and I yearn for their return.”
I pause, trying to gauge the atmosphere before speaking. But I can’t. Normally I’m pretty good at that kind of thing, but I think I was ripped away from my photo processing without the proper chance to regroup.
“I don’t think I can quite remember any such days, sir,” I say, trying to be honest without at the same time risking my life any more than my job requires.
He opts not to overreact, which is a relief. But he doesn’t lighten up much, either.
“I’m sure you’ll remember, once you give it some thought. When I fi
rst met you, you were that snotty, mouthy, disrespectful punk who was always out of control and in trouble. You remember that kid, certainly?”
It would be conceding too much to answer immediately. So I give it a few extra thwops of the rotor blades first. “Vaguely, I suppose, Colonel.”
“Good, then we are getting somewhere. I’d be worried if you had no recollection of that troublesome young pup whatsoever. After all, you’ve done a great deal of work to grow out of that, and should be proud. At the same time, he is a part of your history, your path, your hash marks, and is therefore important for you to acknowledge. Those who can’t remember the past …” He lets that particular quote hang there.
“I don’t remember the next part,” I say, because apparently I have a desire to be thrown off of an airborne helicopter.
The colonel is taking an unusually serene approach to insolence at the moment, which should maybe worry me.
“Well done, Manion. You came up with an inventive way to say you know exactly what the quote is. Bravo. Now stop being inventive if you don’t wish to be thrown out of an airborne helicopter.”
If he knew me just a little tiny bit less deeply than he does, my whole life would be a different thing right now. The thought is both comforting and terrifying.
“Those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, Col. Macias. I remember that.”
“And you don’t want to be doomed, do you?”
“I do not want to be doomed.”
“Remember it all, Danny. Don’t shy away from what you’ve done, or what must be done. And do not be ashamed of it.”
At this, I go silent. I stop looking at him. I turn to look out my window at the very moment I become aware he’s turning from his window and toward me.
“Right, so you remember. You remember both the things you want to, and the things you don’t. It makes you the man you are. You acknowledge the rascal you were in high school, and also the man you became upon entering the service. That man was the one who didn’t question me. Remember him? That man understood the deal, that to reach the next level of your evolution, Daniel Manion, you were going to have to become the model soldier and more. The fighting machine who could do anything and everything necessary to get a difficult job done. The man who understood that orders were part of the deal. A big part. The man who understood that killing was a big part of the deal.