The Ghosts of My Lai

by JC Braswell

  “Well, if my memory serves me correctly”—Billy looked up at the ceiling tiles, lost in thought for a moment—“it was when the both of you first got together. Right before you went off to college. All I remember is Karen coughing.”

  “I’d rather not remember.” Her cheeks turned red with embarrassment, prompting Williams to laugh. She’d gagged for five minutes when she took her first hit. Three minutes later, she claimed she needed to go to the hospital because she was walking on the moon.

  “All right. I won’t pry,” he slurred his words. “So Earl and I are going to take these fine ladies back to the pad, if you know what I mean. Listen to a little Jimi. Smoke a little stuff. Call it a night. You hear?”

  “Loud and clear.” Williams glanced at his replenished drink. Suddenly it didn’t look as appealing.

  “You sure you don’t want to come back? Our last night together. It’s your birthday, man. Live a little.” Billy dipped his shoulders, doing anything he could to persuade Williams to come back to his apartment, if that’s what he wanted to call it. It was more like the world’s largest closet.

  “Dude, I’ve got a crib to put together tomorrow. I read the instructions. Not exactly easy.”

  “That’s not cool. Not feeling the love, man.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  Williams couldn’t help but think about the trials his boys were about to endure. Thankfully, their ignorance to the whole situation gave him some comfort. At least they could enjoy the last few weeks of freedom.

  “Tell you what. How about just one last shot with us?” Billy’s crooked smile swallowed his cheeks.

  “Ok, fine. Just one shot. One shot and that’s all.” He knew Karen disapproved, but these were his boys, his comrades for life.

  “Awesome, dude.” He waved Jezebel over. Her low-cut blouse jiggled and a wry smile curled at the tips of her cherry-red lips as she approached.

  “Staying a little longer, I see?” she said, playing with them.

  Just one, Williams mouthed to Karen. She squinted and turned away.

  “Hey cupcake, how about three?” Billy turned and looked down at Karen’s slightly protruding belly. “Make that four kamikazes.”

  “Billy, in case you didn’t notice, I’m pregnant. You know what the doctors are saying these days.” She slapped Billy on the shoulder.

  “Ain’t for you, baby.” Billy rubbed her tummy. “I’m talking about the little guy in there. This may be the last time all four of us are together. Know what I’m saying?”

  “Why do you have to say something like that?” Williams said. “You know damn well you’re coming back. Hell, you’re gonna be the little one’s godfather.”

  “Dude.” Billy extended his arms out to his sides. “I’m sure as hell coming back, and so is our boy. But with you working them long hours, hell, I’m not sure if we’re going to be seeing you even when we return. Might have to take care of Karen, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.” Williams laughed. Billy always could turn the bleakest of situations around.

  Williams put his hand on top of Karen’s to give her a reassuring squeeze. She didn’t pull away as anticipated, instead allowing it to linger. She was like that. Even though she was annoyed, she understood what those guys meant to him. Though she bit her tongue now, he knew she would have a few words with him later.

  “And here we go, boys.” Jezebel spread the shots out in front of Williams, making sure to press her oversized breasts into the bar. “One for you, one for you.” She slid the shot down to Earl. “And two for you.”

  “No, just one.” Williams waved it off.

  “As I said, I’ll do it for the boy.” Billy snagged the shot.

  Williams eyed the opaque lemon-colored liquid and gave it a few swirls. He looked at his childhood friends and back to Karen. He never wanted the night to end. Everyone he cared about was in attendance, happy, celebrating, at peace with each other. It was too perfect.

  “Happy Birthday to my best buddy. Happy Birthday to the man!” Billy raised his shot. Earl and Williams followed.

  “Yeah. Happy Birthday to me.” Williams hesitated.

  The shot bit at his tongue. The night would bite harder.

  TWENTY SIX

  The familiar bark from a howler monkey rattled Williams from his stupor. He didn’t know how long he was out, but it seemed like an eternity as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was surprised to find that he was still alive. Again.

  Williams struggled to open his eyes. His face tingled with bites and sunburn. The thin layer of grit plastering his forehead and cheeks only made it worse. And as he came to, he realized the infection had spread further throughout his body, unhindered and free from medication. His lungs could barely sustain a breath.

  But he had to get up. He had to keep moving.

  At first he couldn’t concentrate, his mind still clouded with his nightmare. He rolled to his side, feeling a slight tug at the back of his tongue before he released a concoction of half-digested C-rations and bile. A small cloud of insects swooped down and feasted on his vomit just as fast.

  Garcia’s image flashed before him as he heaved in the amber morning waves from the sun. He thought it was a mirage, a delusion from his illness.

  “Garcia.” He didn’t want to believe.

  Garcia’s body lay motionless in a prone position, arms at his sides, his legs extended out.

  More bile welled up in his throat. He crawled through his own puke, ignoring the pain, using his forearms as hooks, digging each into the soft soil. A few irreverent bloodsuckers hovered above Garcia’s corpse. His complexion mirrored a porcelain doll’s, red bags under his eyes, the rest as white as snow.

  “Bud,” Williams muttered, pulling up to his side. “Wake up, man.” Williams choked out the words with false hope as he grabbed Garcia’s hand. It felt cold and covered with dew, devoid of life. “Wake up.” He knew better. Garcia was gone.

  He tossed Garcia’s helmet aside, causing his head to roll to the side and reveal the right side of his neck. Blood had coagulated around the gaping wound in his throat where withered tissue and muscle were exposed. The tiger had come and found its mark, removing Garcia’s esophagus. But that was it. No tearing, no signs of fighting, not even a claw mark. There was only that one singular bite mark.

  Why?

  Williams tore up a clump of grass, tears streaming from his already swollen eyes. Garcia should have been the one to survive, the one to make it out of this hell. There would be no helicopter to take him. No letter home to his parents. Garcia would rot, attracting all sorts of jungle scavengers to desecrate his body. The thought made his throat burn with bile. He failed his friend.

  How did this happen? Williams remembered the night before. The beast’s warm fur brushed against his leg. Its ominous eyes lingered in Vietnam’s shadows.

  Logic soon took precedence. The attack didn’t make sense. It should’ve taken Garcia’s body, dragging him off in the woods to feast. Although animal attack stories were rare in the Vietnam jungle, they happened, and when they did there was nothing left of the prey.

  Williams recalled his second encounter with a tiger. A sniper tracked their movements, following the band for two weeks, picking off one, sometimes two a day. The day before their duty was to end, the savage had revealed himself, a handful of grenades at his side, his gun fresh out of ammo.

  The sniper intended to finish his job. He certainly didn’t expect what happened next. The golden beast had leapt from the foliage and tackled Williams’s nemesis.

  Its sabre-like teeth bore down on the sniper’s skull. His cries were like no other Williams had heard before—a phantom wail filled with terror. The tiger twisted the Viet Cong trooper around like a ragdoll, ripping skin from flesh and popping bones underneath before dragging the hapless soldier into the brush, leaving a fresh trail of blood in its wake. The silent assassin saved Williams life that day.

  But this was different. The attack w
asn’t nearly as brutal. A single bite through the neck spelled a quick end to Garcia. Whatever beast took Garcia had a purpose as well, and it was not born out of hunger. It had not come to feed. It came to kill, but animals didn’t kill for pleasure. Only humans were motivated by that instinct.

  Or does nothing separate us? Are we all just the same? Williams peeled back Garcia’s collar again. He searched for it, just a hint of silver.

  No dog tags. McEvoy, Anuska. None of them. His mind raced for a possible explanation. A tiger wouldn’t have taken Garcia’s dog tags.

  “Captain,” Jackson called, retarding Williams’s thought process. He’d forgotten about the rest of them, too focused on Garcia. “Captain,” Jackson groaned again, struggling to pull himself into an upright position.

  “I’m here.” Williams looked around for the others. Harris, Donovan, and Simmons were either asleep or dead, sprawled out on their backs.

  “Cap, not sure if I feel so good.” Jackson’s expression changed from exhaustion to dread as he glanced at Garcia. “Oh no. Not Garcia.”

  “Yeah.” Williams kept his focus away from Garcia’s corpse and reached for his canteen. The small trickle of lukewarm liquid did little to soothe his thirst.

  “His throat.” Jackson leaned over the dead medic and plucked the faded picture of Jesus from Garcia’s helmet. “Damn near ripped his head off.”

  “I know.”

  “That shadow we saw last night? Remember that tiger we saw several months ago?” It was as if Jackson could read his mind.

  “Possible.”

  “Garcia, bless his soul, might’ve been best for him. He stuck around enough to save us and all, but he was suffering. It was almost like—”

  “Mercy.” Williams bit his lower lip as it dawned on him. It made sense. “He refused to participate. Even when most everybody else pressed forward in the village, he refused. Including me.”

  “Man, this ain’t good. Like the soul of group is gone now.” Jackson’s head dropped to Garcia’s stomach. He hummed one of those old black folk song laced with a hint of blues. Williams couldn’t help but smile. Garcia would have liked Jackson’s impromptu service. “Why?”

  “Maybe the VC was right about spirits. Maybe we just mistook what he meant by spirits. Maybe it’s karma, who knows?” Williams’s voice trembled as he reached out for Jackson to help him to his feet. “We’re racing against more than time now. Don’t want to stick around to see what surprises the jungle has left.”

  “You gonna be ok, Cap? You ain’t looking too hot yourself.”

  “As good as I can be.” Blood rushed down Williams’s leg, causing waves of agony as he stood.

  “Hot damn, your leg…looks terrible.” Jackson looked up. His eyes were twice as wide with concern.

  “I’ll deal with it.” Williams’s vision swirled with glimpses of the jungle in a dizzying array of green, brown, and red. Jackson grabbed him before he fell.

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “Just get everybody up,” Williams choked out. “We’ll pretend I’m fine.”

  Jackson went to his task, thumping each of them on the shoulder to stir them from sleep or to confirm death.

  Williams scanned their makeshift campsite and out to the ravine. Even the ground itself seemed to have transformed overnight, become thicker with no signs of the trail they forged. He had no recollection of the area, the foreign terrain. The river was their only saving grace.

  As he plotted his course through the coppice of trees ahead, Williams noticed something odd. He counted one, then two, then three. Each tree, about shoulder height, had been skinned of bark, exposing wood underneath.

  The hint of fresh sap invaded his senses as he approached. What at first appeared to be slash marks came into focus. His neck pimpled with gooseflesh.

  Impossible. Carved within the grooves of the bark were flowing circles and dagger-like ridges, forming the image of a dragon. It took a second and then he realized. The designs mirrored the golden totem of the dragon Simmons and the others had disgraced. Wish McEvoy was alive to see this.

  He pushed off the tree and looked back at Garcia’s corpse.

  Nothing is adding up. Doesn’t make sense.

  He reached in his pocket and searched for Anuska’s crumpled picture, a way to help him remember. Instead he snagged a handful of smooth beads that circled around his fingers. He pulled them out, revealing a glint of silver forming a chain. At the bottom, Garcia’s dog tags reflected the sun back at him.

  “Garcia.”

  His friend hadn’t given up.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  Williams wrapped Garcia’s dog tags around his wrist and fastened it as tight as he could. With the help of few saplings, he fashioned himself another archaic crutch, limping along after the four others. They had dwindled to five. The fact wasn’t lost on Williams.

  Donovan took point, hacking away with the worn machete as best he could with his good hand, nowhere near the brute force of Simmons and Jackson. Williams asked them all what had happened the night before. Their response mirrored his—they blacked out. None of them witnessed Garcia’s demise.

  Donovan had suffered the most next to Garcia, having tripped over what he described as a “furry branch.” His flashlight shattered, causing a shard of glass to puncture his eye. Using a piece of Garcia’s shirt, Donovan had fashioned a bandage around the crown of his head and down across his eye. It was a macabre sight. Torn tissue and dried blood surrounded a yellow custard-like sphere. But Donovan kept his spirits up as best he could.

  Then there was the matter of the tiger that trailed there every move. Although Williams couldn’t see it, it grew bolder, flashes of color breaking the monotony of green and brown as they plodded forward. At times he swore it was right beside him, its chest heaving, its muscular frame weaving through the trees, waiting for him to fall, but Williams refused. He squeezed Garcia’s dog tags tight and willed himself along the makeshift trail.

  It was only two hours into their march when Williams noticed another odd occurrence: the sun had already begun to dip below the horizon. Had they slept through the night and morning?

  “I can’t do it.” Harris tripped into a short thicket of jagged plants alien in appearance. The jungle itself descended into an even more feral state, masking the floor underneath. “Damn it,” he cried. His spirit was officially broken.

  “Come on, dude. Don’t lose yourself on me now,” Donovan, having lost enough weight to swim in his fatigues, said.

  “We ain’t gonna make it.” Harris’s face contorted as he pulled his leg from the thorns.

  “Here we go again,” Simmons whined.

  “No, we’re going to make it, buddy. I promise. We’re almost there.” Donovan pulled the dejected eighteen year old close and hugged him. It was the type of hug a brother would give to a younger sibling. Harris buried his head into Donovan’s shoulder and cried as hard as Williams had ever heard.

  “Death Dealers are a bunch of jackoffs now. Harris, you disappoint me, boy. I was training you to be tougher than this, not some coddling faggot.” Simmons spat out a wad of dark matter.

  In a gesture of goodwill, Donovan offered some betel nut to Simmons. It was also a covert way of shutting the Texan up. Simmons gnawed on it between verbal spats.

  “Keep it to yourself,” Jackson said, his face sweating like a glass of lemonade in the middle of a summer picnic.

  “Screw you, and screw all y’all. At least I’ll die with dignity, because we are gonna die. Make no mistake about that. You hear that, whoever the hell you are?” he shouted towards the sky. “Williams is gonna kill us all. You gotta get me outta here if you want to live, Harris. Screw these turncoats,” Simmons continued his tirade at Harris, who pulled his fatigues up over his face and whimpered. “I promise you, we’ll make it out of here. Both you and me. No thanks to him.” Simmons’s crazed eyes peered back over his shoulder at Williams.

  Williams returned the gesture, unwilling to let the bull stak
e its claim. He didn’t fear the man-turned-demon. Not anymore. He would just as soon see him buried below the red earth than walk with him, but he was still compelled to save them all.

  “We ain’t got no rifles. Ain’t got no bullets. Don’t get me started about our food situation. We’re just left with shit to eat and piss to drink. Best of all, we got a gimp leading us. When he falls, I can promise I’m leaving your sorry asses behind.”

  Williams ignored Simmons and focused on keeping his footing, counting each step in his head as he willed the troops deeper into the labyrinth.

  The cycle repeated itself for another hour as the deeper hues of dusk fell across the jungle along with a thin layer of fog. They would soon find themselves under the veil of darkness, another endless night in Vietnam’s plagued lands.

  “Look over there, under those two branches that look like an archway. Think I see possible clearing. Could be the opening we saw up on that plateau,” Williams said, pointing out a possible escape. “Maybe we…maybe we should set up for the night. Get some…rest.” There was no other choice. It was too late to go any further.

  “Another night here.” Donovan sighed, dejection written in the frown lines from his rawhide-colored face. “Can’t we keep going? At least a couple more hours?”

  “None of us are in any condition to keep going.” Williams sucked oxygen, feeling another damned bout of nausea beginning its assault.

  “I can keep going,” Donovan pleaded.

  “No, we stick together. We got ourselves separated last night and looked what happened. If we set up camp there, we’ll have the river to our back.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just give me one more night, Donnie.”

  “Man, this is bullshit.” Simmons accentuated his Southern drawl. “You want us all to die.”

  “Not all of us,” Williams defied Simmons once more.

  “Oh, great. I thought you were going to be my savior.”

  “In order to have a savior, you have to want be to saved,” Williams dismissed Simmons, having had enough of the Texan’s antics. He removed a thumb-sized piece of flint from his pocket and handed it to his machine gunner. “Jackson, found this on Garcia. Try to make a fire. We’ll probably need it.”