Fatal Light

by Richard Currey

  Also by Richard Currey

  Fiction

  Crossing Over: A Vietnam Journey

  Fatal Light

  The Wars of Heaven

  Lost Highway

  Nonfiction

  Medicine for Sale

  Copyright © 1988, 2009 by Richard Currey

  All rights reserved under international and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a database, or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Santa Fe Writers Project, SFWP and colophon are trademarks.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Currey, Richard, 1949-

  Fatal Light/by Richard Currey.—20th anniversary ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9776799-2-8

  ISBN: 0-9776799-2-6

  1. Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.V6665F38 2009

  813’.54—dc22

  2008056003

  Cover design by Bill Douglas at The Bang

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Visit SFWP’s website: www.sfwp.com and literary journal: www.sfwp.org

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and episodes are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not construed to be real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Also by Richard Currey

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  MORTAL PLACES

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  IN-COUNTRY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  BONE BLOOD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  MALARIA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  SAIGON

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  HOME

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Introduction

  A few years ago I visited Cannon Air Force Base. Situated out in the great wide open of southern New Mexico, Cannon is the home of the 27th Special Operations Wing. The occasion of my visit was a National Endowment for the Arts program called Operation Homecoming. In partnership with the Department of Defense and Boeing Aircraft, Operation Homecoming dispatched more than 20 poets, novelists, and journalists to bring writing workshops to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan at numerous duty stations both within the US and abroad, including in the combat theatre in the Middle East. Operation Homecoming introduced many of our troops to the idea that writing about their military and combat experiences might serve them, the nation, and the greater good in a number of ways. Aside from the possibility that some form of emotional catharsis and at least a step toward psychological healing might stem from self-expression, Operation Homecoming also sought to allay fears that many might have regarding the act of putting words on paper, to explore the mechanics and challenges of the writing process, and looked to foster a safe and tempered environment for all kinds of writers with all manner of notions about how to say what they wanted to say.

  I rented a car in Albuquerque and drove the 200 miles southeast to arrive at Cannon’s main gate after dark. It was the first time I had been on a military installation in more than 30 years. The gate sentries were officious and vaguely threatening—as they were supposed to be—and asked me to pull into a space adjacent to the guardhouse and wait in the car. I parked and sat and in a moment the base’s executive officer arrived. He was a colonel, geared out in field jacket and camos and garrison cap. He smiled and shook my hand and welcomed me on behalf of his commanding officer and said that I was to follow his driver to the BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters) where I was “billeted” for the night. The requisite introductory speech concluded, the colonel leaned a bit closer and said that when he learned I was coming he looked up my work, and got hold of a copy of Fatal Light.

  He told me that he was not a reader, and was generally intolerant of “stuff that’s made up.” He noted that most of his reading kept to official documents and aviation manuals and an occasional newsmagazine. Fatal Light was the first fiction he had read in many years. He thanked me for “keeping the book short,” and said he thought the story I told was powerful and surmised that it would ring true to the experience of many. But then he lowered his voice and said, “And it was written by a very angry young man.”

  My Operation Homecoming colleagues were arriving by then, and the personal moment with the colonel passed. Later that evening, after drinks and dinner and conversation were had and I was back in my room, I stepped out and sat on a wooden bench in a small grassy area. The New Mexico sky was domed and improbably vast, belted with stars. The night hovered, quiet beyond measure except for the sound of the wind, blowing out in the endless blue dark of the desert, and I thought about the colonel’s remark. He was a man who, by his own admission, brought no particular sophistication in the ways of novels and storytelling to his reading. He took Fatal Light straight on, read without pretension or expectation, and immediately understood the emotional core of the novel—a young combat veteran’s sad, dispirited, convoluted, muted rage. The colonel had brought a finger down on the precise heart of the story.

  Fatal Light was written in my late 20s and was the evolution of a decade of writing poetry, then prose poetry, and, beginning in 1980, short stories. Most of my working tenets as a writer developed through the disciplines of these short forms. As I evolved toward ever-longer stories (and realized I was becoming a novelist), I wanted to bring the brevity and clarity of focus of the shorter forms I had worked with to a broader storytelling purpose. Fatal Light was the culmination of that, and I framed my story with the classic elements of all war stories told over the last 2,000 years: A young man lifted from an innocent life, plunged into the fear and rabid confusion of war, and then, surviving it, left to pick up his own pieces on the long way home. But aside from reflecting my own historical moment and my generation’s place in that moment, I wanted to tell an old story from what I hoped might be a different approach, a stripped-down journey through a soldier’s life and mind where the nature of war is recalibrated in its purest terms.

  Fatal Light drew from some of my own experiences as a Navy corpsman serving with several Marine Corps combat and combat-ready units between 1968
and 1972. But the book is informed not by the literal particularities of my own experience (indeed, most of Fatal Light is highly fictionalized), but by the emotional residue of a few years deep inside Marine infantry units, the “grunts” who function as the first phalanx, down where one can smell the earth and the rain and the riven sweat of the men standing behind and in front and on either side. I was an enlisted man serving with mostly other enlisted men in units that were often ordered into action with the barest of rationale, explanation, or any sense that logic or intelligence was at work anywhere in the process. For me, wartime military service was a quintessential existential experience. And, afterwards, there was, at least for me, a well of anger fueled by a sense of purposeless death and cynical manipulation of men and armies for the sake of what I believed to be short-sighted and self-serving political aims.

  Years have passed and the fervor of my politicization at the age of 20 has been chiseled by any number of realizations along the way, but I still believe that my old anger was neither misplaced nor inappropriate. Yes, wars are vastly complex affairs poorly served by any attempt to simplify or universalize them. But, still, historical analysis does not and will never blunt the reality that it is the warriors themselves who go home (if they make it home) with the burden. And they become the carriers of war’s legacy, experienced by all of them differently but, finally, held in common. And their stories, be they written as the high art of poetry and novels and personal nonfiction, or told over dinner years later at a family gathering, or perhaps never told at all beyond hints and evasions, become an essential part of a nation’s fabric, part of that strange post-war blend of pride and regret, honor and sorrow, shame and satisfaction.

  Fatal Light is a novel sheared down to the primary essentials of the story it tells and the spiritual predicament it describes, one that has no resolution, no solution, that joins the texture of a life and, as the unnamed young narrator of Fatal Light says at one point, sticks there “like a photograph on the spine.”

  At another point that narrator notes that “war stories are our oldest stories.” So it seems, as we now find ourselves slogging through our latest war, two of them, in fact, fought on two fronts. This two-front war’s books and poems and memoirs and potent reports from the morphing lines of battle have been arriving. It is another hard dawn for another battered army, and some of its troopers again feel and write and try to come to terms somewhere in their souls and lives. It is a pleasure to see my own contribution to this tradition revived in this beautiful new edition of Fatal Light. I hope my view of a kind of universal experience might continue to speak to and resonate with the “Iraq and Afghanistan Generation”—by which I mean not only those of you who have or are now serving in uniform, but all of you. Like the Vietnam Generation before you, your war will mark you, and change you, and, finally, define you.

  Richard Currey

  February 2009

  At night in the war I listened to monkeys in the jungle all around me. Low murmur of voices, the clucks and warbles and sighs of monkeys at peace with starlight, and I could rest with their voices knowing that as long as I could hear them I was safe in a ring of darkness, lying there thinking When this is all over and I am out and gone everybody will want to hear the story.

  And the story begins like this: There was a boy standing in the middle of America. He was standing in a winter garden with his toy gun strapped on slightly askew, an easy smile, blond hair cut close to the pale skull, rolled-up cuffs on his jeans. The stretch of distance behind him was indistinct, unreal, as if field and horizon had raced on ahead as he stood to turn and look back.

  He was a boy who rode his bicycle on early summer mornings, past the elementary school named for Mark Twain and the junior high school named for General Patton, out into the wide boulevard with Ormin’s Market at the corner and Henry Ormin sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store window filled with mops and stacks of fruit crates and racks of dusty hats and gardening gloves. The boy had never seen anybody buy a hat or a pair of gloves from Henry Ormin, but hats and gloves lived on in the window, next to the seed envelopes faded by too many sunlit mornings.

  The boy’s bicycle tires hummed the asphalt and birds foraged on lawns, spooked at his approach: Sudden flutter and crowded whisper of wings, flocks wheeling overhead.

  He rode on toward the bridge, riding for the simple pleasure of the open speed, sweat beginning at his hairline and a hard pain above his knees as he pumped against the drag of one gear and balloon tires and an incline, and he slowed on the bridge, halfway across.

  I remember: It was only a short bridge over a creek bed but the gorge seemed formidable, falling away to a thin run in the rocks below. I would take my bicycle to that bridge on early summer mornings and stand at the rail feeling the sun was alive and I was steering the sky into luminous places, happy to be the pilot of the tallest air I could find.

  MORTAL PLACES

  1

  My grandfather kept an album. Photographs, newspaper clippings, yellowed squares pasted on black rag pages. An occasional letter folded into the spine. Stained black-and-whites with notes penned in the margins or on the backs: Uncle Bob Tulley, 1936. With Vallie in California, April 1948. There were obituaries of family and neighbors, sons dead in the Battle of the Bulge, on Guadalcanal; an account of a cousin’s conviction on charges of conspiracy and extortion in the thirties. My grandfather sat beside me as we paged through the heavy book, and he pointed out people, telling their stories. The old photographs seemed always to conceal—shadow days, winter faces—sturdy women watching children or looking away, girls in cottony taffeta, men staring hard and blasted, big-nosed, and tobacco-stained in antiquated suits or huge farmer’s overalls; every picture an event: a wedding, a Christmas, a harvest. A cluster in black gathered at the gates of a cemetery. Bill and Eddie Luke after corn was in. Emma and Tad with kids, Thanksgiving 1943. My grandfather told me that Tad wasn’t in the service in those days because of a clubfoot; he was killed anyway in a thresher accident on the farm, left Emma to go to alcohol and finally suicide, the kids spread out to bitter relatives and orphanages, lost to one kind of destitution or another. There was a picture in the album of me on my second birthday, fat-legged blond on a short ledge with a layer cake, the already extinguished candles leaning into the icing and my face betraying an irritation, a passing anger lost there on that mid-October day. Beyond my grandfather’s house, behind me in the picture, massive trees ranged along the Ohio River’s eastern shore and through the trees the river itself, vast at that point with glisten and scud and the small frame houses on the opposite shore only squares of white or silver flash in the afternoon sun.

  2

  In the long summer visits at my grandfather’s house I walked the abandoned campsites along the river, under the face of the floodwall that followed the railroad tracks. I pushed sticks through the ashes of spent hobo fires, broke wine bottles against the rails and watched the shards glitter on the roadbed. I stood on the bridge that spanned the river between West Virginia and Ohio, watched freight trains troll by beneath me, hollow roar and tilt, car after car clocking past, desires run distant by time and the force of the land. The trains made a music below the bridge, like my mother always said when she read children’s books to me, a long rumble and boom. I walked up the bridge to the imaginary border in the middle of the air where a plaque announced I was about to step into the State of Ohio. There was a low dirty skyline beyond me, factory haze and exhaust smudge. An island drifted downstream, a paradise appearing out of clouds, and a coal barge came toward me, humming a slow wake north.

  3

  Hand-painted banners announcing the Apple Blossom Festival hung between telephone poles along Main Street. A printer had donated handbills that were nailed to fences and taped inside store windows all over town: a parade, animal rides, bake-off, quilting bee, pie-eating contest. In the afternoon at Dedweiler’s pasture there would be aerial barnstormers and at night in the city park the carnival that came every yea
r and a dance in the pavilion with music from the fire hall bluegrass quintet. In that autumn when I turned eleven years old a professional touring group was coming as well, a family of Nashville singers, television smiles and electric guitars and snakeskin western boots, coming to sing on the stage built on festival day by volunteer carpenters from throughout the county.

  On the day of the festival traffic into town was already slow by ten o’clock in the morning. Children crossed the streets and the high school marching band drifted toward its collection point on the courthouse lawn, brass and silver shine of trumpets and tubas scattered on ground cloths, uniforms modeled after those of Hessian soldiers in the Revolutionary War: blousy trousers, epaulets and metal buttons and front panels on vests embellished with mothers’ and grandmothers’ stitchery, a walking fleet of Wellington boots hand-colored white with indigo tassels. I moved beside my grandfather, across the street behind a stalled car and hearing the idle dissonant honks of high school musicians, echo and rattle of snare drums, vendors shouting and somewhere in the distance an automobile horn stuck and moaning. I asked my grandfather for a bag of popcorn from a red cart, and we stopped and my grandfather and the vendor exchanged pleasantries.

  Beautiful day for the festival, Bob, my grandfather said.