by Chris Lynch
“Charlie isn’t all sappy for beauty spots, I guess.”
“Charlie doesn’t have time for beauty spots. Not to mention that Charlie’s whole world is one big beauty spot. Or at least it was, until we lit into it.”
He goes totally quiet then, and focuses so intently on the map that it seems like he might disappear into it.
Suddenly, he snaps upright, pulls his shirt back on, and hitches up his web gear.
I’ve seen this many times. Col. Macias studies a map for a couple of minutes, inhales all its details, and then doesn’t consult it again.
“Come on, Manion,” he says assertively, as if he senses that I’m resistant to the plan. If I had the capacity to resist, I actually might. Especially after he gets to the good part. “We have three very hard miles to go, before I puncture your eye with sharp objects.”
“Gee, sweep me off my feet why don’tcha, Colonel?” I say as he yanks me up into an approximation of an upright position. I immediately feel like I’m going to black out.
And so, sweeping me off my feet is what he does.
“Your only jobs now, Daniel, are to remain conscious and maintain your grip,” he says. Then drapes me over his back like he’s pulling on a knapsack. “I’ll do the rest.”
As far as divisions of labor go, you’d have to say I got a pretty good deal there. But I’m still foaming with anxiety over whether I’ll be able to fulfill my part of the bargain.
* * *
I remain conscious, but without being conscious of very much of the world around me. My focus is on holding tight and holding myself up. My entire world right now extends no farther than my own head and arms, and the strong back of Col. Macias. I could be in Laos or Las Vegas, and there would be no difference. All the terrain I can sense is the shocking hardness of the colonel. He attacks the trail decisively, marching with the same steady, tenacious pace he always maintains, despite the fact that I’m clinging to his back like a baby chimp.
“Good thing we made the brilliant decision to travel so lightly today, eh, Danny?” he says, probably to keep me engaged, rather than out of any burning desire to talk. His voice doesn’t give away any undue stress caused by my dead weight. I’m breathing heavier than he is. “Yes, this lack of radio, explosives, heavy weaponry, rations … That stuff would just be slowing us down, right?”
He’s joking but he’s not. This is the type of failure that’ll eat at the colonel for ages. If, in fact, we have ages left to live.
We went joyriding. To shoot an elephant. Except for the animal murder element, it’s exactly the kind of stunt I would have pulled in the old days. And Mr. Macias the teacher/counselor/coach would have scalped me for. I would never have thought this before—and I most likely never will again—but Macias should feel like a jerk right now.
“It’s not your fault, sir,” I say, pretty close to his ear. “It was one hour. It was relatively safe. We were betrayed.”
“It’s never safe, Daniel. Never. I should know that. I do know that. I dropped the ball. But it’s a mistake you will never make, so that hard-learned lesson is what we can take away from this.”
He steps into a hole, grunts hard, stomps back up out of it, and picks up speed as some sort of compensation. Or penance.
“You sure are one teacher who goes above and beyond to teach a lesson,” I joke.
“Good teaching should never look this hard,” he says.
So there will be no letup on the guilt trail today, then.
* * *
I don’t know if I broke the pact about not losing consciousness. I suspect I did. But I kept the bargain on maintaining my grip, which was the really important part.
Still, it’s a shock to me when I hear the invigorating shooosh of the waterfall just ahead.
“Dad, are we there yet?” I say, feeling pretty clever for a guy who was just piggybacked for miles over some of Earth’s most unforgiving terrain.
“Does somebody have a desire to get himself chucked under a waterfall?” he responds.
“He does not. Sorry, sir.”
As gently as one overtaxed man can, Col. Macias lays me down in a semi-secluded doghouse of low-lying, heavy foliage. He kneels, flashing his penlight right in my eyes. It hurts quite considerably now, and that’s just the light. For the first time I start thinking seriously about the operation itself, and I feel the panic rising in me. I start hyperventilating.
“Stop that,” he snaps.
“Sorry, sir,” I say again, and will probably say again and again.
He sighs and pulls the light away from my eye.
“No, Daniel, I’m sorry. I realize how difficult this is. You go ahead and breathe any way you need to breathe in order to get through it. But the fact is, we have got to do this right now, before the natural light fades. And before your light fades. So, are you ready, kid?”
“No, sir!” I say in the most robust jolly-liar voice I can manage.
* * *
Within minutes, Col. Macias has his web gear off. He’s got my web gear off. He’s got my boots and socks off. He’s got his map-shirt off and has laid it down, close to where our clearing meets the rushing water. He takes out his compact medical kit and, after washing and disinfecting his hands as though he is trying to remove all the skin, he places me flat on my back, on top of the shirt, by the water. My head is pointed toward the bank. If this all goes haywire, maybe his plan is to just shove me like a felled tree into the white water.
“I like the mist,” I say. “And the rushing sound.” I mean it, too, very much. The effect is dreamy, soothing.
“I’m sure you do,” he says. “Although I suspect the morphine likes the mist and the rushing sound at least as much as you do.”
There were a couple of injections that I barely noticed a few minutes ago. I notice them now, though.
“That’s fine with me,” I say. “Maybe I should have some more of that before the cutting commences.”
“Nope,” he says, applying some thick oily gel to my throbbing eye. “But I can allow you all the antiseptic eye ointment and rushing waterfall you desire. Just say the word.”
“Right,” I say. “I’ll let you know.”
The colonel goes about his preparations in the same way I’ve witnessed him go about any other duties—in this life or in the previous one. Whether throwing his whole physical self into demonstrating a side-roll counter in wrestling practice, or leaning halfway across his desk at a parents’ night conference to assure my dad that I had more potential than any of us really thought. Whether doing a night jump from an airplane into a fetid swamp, or diving SOG-knife-first into a spider hole to slaughter a Vietcong commando on impact, he approaches everything with the exact same cold, matter-of-fact diligence.
Just as he’s doing now with my pre-op arrangements. I’m almost calmed by the combination of the waterfall—which I now understand as one more element of the man’s meticulous planning—plus the sedation, plus the Macias effect.
But almost turns out to be not enough. Because when he pulls the protective wrapping off of the sterile medical blade, my breathing picks up again, even worse than before.
“That’s fine, Dan. You breathe as hard or as soft as you want, as long as you keep breathing. But you cannot, cannot move. Promise me.”
“I promise, sir,” I squeal as I simultaneously feel myself trying to backflip into the water.
He senses it, though, and straddles my arms, pinning me under him like the wrestler-colonel that he is.
“Okay. Revised plan. Move whatever you want, Danny, or try to, except not the head. I can promise you to be extremely quick with this, but I can’t promise anything else.”
“Ahhhh … Rrrrrr!” I quietly scream as his insanely powerful legs paralyze my body. He holds my head hard to the ground. My body tries to squirm out of it, just like the insects I used to pin to the ground with my finger as a kid. He has a thumb in my good eye, which causes me to look that way automatically, exposing the extreme right corner of t
he damaged one. By design.
And then he cuts.
“Wh-haaawww!” My fingernails carve into the ground beneath me, until I feel every one of them peeling back.
“Good job, Danny! Good job. You’re doing great,” Col. Macias says, mopping furiously but delicately at whatever my eye is now spewing. I growl as quietly hard as I can, and continue clawing and pawing at the Laotian earth. I hear Macias scrabbling about, until I feel one more new sensation.
“Owwwwww, ahhh, grrrr.” All these delightful noises come out of me as I feel the needle pierce the outer wrapping of my eye. But I keep my head still. I keep my eyes where they are locked. I have no idea how I manage this.
“Good training, that’s all I can say,” he mutters. “Good training in the home, in school, and in the service. That’s how a man like you is made, Daniel Manion.”
It is the greatest compliment a guy could possibly get, and I wish I could spit the entire mouthful of it across the globe.
Where my dad could maybe enjoy it.
My dad. Oh. Oh, Dad. I’m not even here, am I?
Another puncture, another tug of the needle and thread. And another. Then a pulling sensation, a tying off, and a rapid slathering of ointment. This is quickly followed by tearing and crumpling and a swift application of an eye bandage to seal the whole thing up again. Tight and dark and padded away.
I lie still, flat on my back. Flatter on my back than I ever thought flatness of back could be achieved, in wrestling or in life.
Slowly, Col. Macias climbs off of me—rolls off of me, really—and I feel him thump to the ground alongside me. There is no motion, no sensation anywhere on all of planet Earth right now, other than the blessed water rushing furiously past our conjoined, tapped-out skulls.
Dear Daniel,
Missing in Southeast Asia. That is the sum total of what our government will tell me. One would think that the most powerful nation on Earth, with the most extensive network of global intelligence services and operations, might be able to go into slightly greater detail. If they can take aerial photographs documenting every flicker of every malevolent thought Fidel Castro has in Cuba, it should not be too much to expect that level of specificity elsewhere. Such as when informing the family of a war hero that they have somehow misplaced that hero—because that is what you are, son, a misplaced hero—in a very dangerous part of the world. They should do better than to cast a net as wide as all of Southeast Asia. I trust you are quite aware by now what a sprawling swath of the globe Southeast Asia actually is.
The fact that you’re missing is unsettling enough, Daniel. Being missing in such a vast place is the stuff of nightmares.
I suspect this letter will never make it to you, even if I knew where to send it. I don’t care. I will continue writing. I will continue sending. I will continue expecting.
Love,
Dad
There is no such thing as time or place. I don’t know when I’m awake or asleep. I would say that I don’t know whether I’m alive or dead, except for the fact that Col. Macias leans hard into my ear every once in a while and says, “Are you still with me, kid? Stay with me, right? You will stay with me.”
Sometimes I summon the strength and focus to snap back with, “Where else am I gonna go? I can’t get anywhere unless you’re carrying me. And even then, I’ll be staying with you, right?”
That response pleases him. Even though I have no idea how many times I’ve trotted it out for him. Genuinely, no idea.
But mostly I just groan. I do a lot of groaning, usually until the colonel insists that I knock it off and act like an elite fighting man. I knock it off right away when he says that.
He changes my eye dressing as often as is sensible, considering our much-limited supplies and the uncertainty of how long we’ll be on our own. While my eye goop has apparently stopped leaking out of me, there’s very little else we can say for sure about my condition. The colonel diligently asks me about my sight during the few minutes between de-bandaging and re-bandaging, and I diligently report that it’s like looking through Vaseline. Then, when he patches me up again, the same feeling returns, where I can’t tell where the squishy ooze of the ointment ends and the squishy ooze of my eye begins.
It’s likely that I’ve developed an infection. I have a furious fever most of the time, struggle to keep my good eye open in the rare moments when I even want to, and spend most of my elite fighting training in battling relentless dreams. Daydreams, nightdreams, netherdreams. None of them nice dreams.
I think if you spend enough time with your eyes closed, you’ll eventually see everything you have ever done.
And it will look far worse than it did the first time.
You will shoot and kill one of Earth’s truest, greatest inhabitants for no good reason. You’ll see the scope of the elephant’s brilliance clearly through the scope of a rifle. And you’ll pull the trigger anyway.
You will join with an armed mob of men in raining overwhelming fire down on a mostly unarmed crew of working women. You’ll fire away until they are dead. You’ll keep firing even after they’re dead, even as pieces fly off them. You’ll keep firing until they stop moving, which they cannot actually do until you stop shooting them. And then you’ll fire some more.
You saw them. Clearly. You see them more clearly now, when seeing anything else is hard to do.
* * *
There’s a canteen dribbling water over my lips, and Col. Macias is chattering words into my ear.
“Are you capable, Daniel?” he asks. I come to the realization that he has been talking to me for some time now.
“You know I’m capable, sir. That’s why I’m here. I knew what the deal was. I knew I would have to do some killing as part of my assignment. I didn’t know or expect that I would be required to put bullets into the big beautiful head of an innocent elephant, or that I would be required to shred the daylights out of a bunch of girls who weren’t doing anything but fixing a road. The worst thing I ever did to a girl before that was try to kiss her without being invited to. And for that I got a punch in the face. These girls never even got the chance to punch me in the face.
“I thought I was just going to kill guys here. But when I had to do all that other stuff, I did it. So, yes, I think I am capable. Sir.”
There’s something like silence as the colonel helps me up into a sitting position. Then I notice a sound. A very distinctive sound, unlike all the jungle chirping and water swooshing I’ve gotten used to over the week or ten or twelve days we’ve been stuck out here.
It’s a plane.
“All that notwithstanding, Manion,” he finally says, “I was just asking if you were capable of moving. It looks like we might be getting rescued.”
“Oh,” I say.
Though I’m only sitting, I already feel dizzy from the act of getting even partially upright. My patched eye is throbbing like it’s trying to blast itself right out of my stupid skull. I hope it’s true that we’re getting rescued, because we have pretty much run out of anything that would be usable for replacing my eye dressing even one more time. It feels soaked through, and I’m sure I can smell that certain scent of infection coming down from my own eyehole. I’m waving away insects so regularly I’m starting to think they want to make a nest out of whatever’s left of my right eye socket.
And the left one isn’t doing so great, either. It’s strained and light-sensitive and dried out from doing all the sight work. Macias is actually helping out with the shoo-fly action of debugging my head. I can’t imagine how horrific I look from his angle.
Plane or no plane, we have to move.
“I’m capable, sir,” I say as I gradually become more used to being up off my back.
“Excellent,” he says. “I’ll climb to the top of that tree there and signal that spotter plane before it leaves the area.”
He sticks the canteen into my hand, along with a small chunk of the complete mystery meat that’s been keeping us alive these past several days.
I just think of it as raw, salty, chewy, dead, native Laotian creature. Then he scampers toward the tree.
“Colonel,” I say before he can get far.
“Yes, Daniel,” he says impatiently.
“Could we have saved Garvine’s life? If we’d been on the ball that day?”
He does not hesitate.
“No. Nobody can save anybody’s life. That is a power neither you nor I nor anybody else has. So don’t flatter yourself, and don’t burden yourself. Nobody can save a life. The closest you can come is to postpone a death.”
He stares at me a few more seconds with an “Anything else?” expression.
I just take a bite of my animal cracker. He begins scaling his tree.
* * *
“We have to get to higher ground,” Col. Macias says as we set off, away from the waterside that has been our home and life source. “They saw my mirror signal and signaled back. We know they’re coming for us but we don’t know when, where, or how exactly. So the only thing we can do is get to the highest ground possible, while staying within the vicinity of where they saw the signal.”
“Yes, sir,” I say as he begins once again to drape me over his back the same way he did when he got me here. I don’t feel quite as damaged as I did then, but at the same time I’m somehow more woozy and wobbly. The many days of inactivity have left my muscles feeling boiled and stretched. But after a few strides of the old zombie and son routine, I think we can do better.
“Sir,” I say, pulling up on his shoulders like the reins of a horse.
“No time,” he answers, dragging me along several more yards.
“I can walk,” I say.
He stops. “You can?”
“I can try, anyway. With a little help.”
In one swift, smooth motion, Col. Macias swings me from being his backpack to being his shoulder pad. We walk like this for a time, quickly getting the three-legged race rhythm together.
“Frankly,” he says, “this is a bit of a relief. I’m not feeling quite as strong as when I carried you before. I think somehow you’ve put on weight while we’ve been here on holiday. All that lying lazy by the water.”