Have you ever seen a more beautiful piece of metal?" He starts snapping the steel components back together. "Her connector assembly is so beautiful..."
Leonard continues to babble as his trained fingers reassemble the black metal hardware.
I think about Vanessa, my girl back home. We're on a river bank, wrapped in an old sleeping bag, and I'm fucking her eyes out. But my favorite fantasy has gone stale. Thinking about Vanessa's thighs, her dark nipples, her fully lips doesn't give me a hard-on anymore. I guess it must be the saltpeter in our food, like they say.
Leonard reaches under his pillow and comes out with a loaded magazine. Gently, he inserts the metal magazine into his weapon, into Charlene.
"Leonard...where did you get those live rounds?"
Now a lot of guys are sitting up, whispering, "What's happening?" to each other.
Sergeant Gerheim's light floods the far end of the squad bay.
"OKAY, LEONARD, LET'S GO." I'm determined to save my own ass if I can, certain that Leonard's is forfeit in any case. The last time Sergeant Gerheim caught a recruit with a live round--just one round--he ordered the recruit to dig a grave ten feet long and ten feet deep.
The whole platoon had to fall out for the "funeral." I say, "You're in a world of shit now, Leonard."
The overhead lights explode. The squad bay is washed with light. "WHAT'S THIS MICKEY
MOUSE SHIT? JUST WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS H. CHRIST ARE YOU
ANIMALS DOING IN MY SQUAD BAY?"
Sergeant Gerheim comes at me like a mad dog. His voice cuts the squad bay in half: "MY
BEAUTY SLEEP HAS BEEN INTERRUPTED, LADIES. YOU KNOW WHAT THAT
MEANS. YOU HEAR ME, HERD? IT MEANS THAT ONE RECRUIT HAS
VOLUNTEERED HIS YOUNG HEART FOR A GODDAMN HUMAN SACRIFICE!'
Leonard pounces from his rack, confronts Sergeant Gerheim.
Now the whole platoon is awake. We all wait to see what Sergeant Gerheim will do, confident that it will be worth watching.
"Private Joker. You shitbird. Front and center."
I move my ass. "AYE-AYE, SIR!"
"Okay, you little maggot, speak. Why is Private Pyle out of his rack after lights out? Why is Private Pyle holding that weapon? Why ain't you stomping Private Pyle's guts out?"
"SIR, it is the Private's duty to report to the drill instructor that Private...Pyle...has a full magazine and has locked and loaded, SIR."
Sergeant Gerheim looks at Leonard and nods. He sighs. Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim looks more than a little ridiculous in his pure white skivvies and red rubber flip-flop shower shoes and hairy legs and tattooed forearms and a beer gut and a face the color of raw beef, and, on his bald head, the green and brown Smokey the Bear campaign cover.
Our senior drill instructor focuses all of his considerable powers of intimidation into his best John-Wayne-on Suribachi voice: "Listen to me, Private Pyle. You will place your weapon on your rack and--"
"NO! YOU CAN'T HAVE HER! SHE'S MINE! YOU HEAR ME? SHE'S MINE! I LOVE
HER!"
Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim can't control himself any longer. "NOW YOU LISTEN TO ME, YOU FUCKING WORTHLESS LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT. YOU WILL GIVE ME THAT
WEAPON OR I'M GOING TO TEAR YOUR BALLS OFF AND STUFF THEM DOWN
YOUR SCRAWNY LITTLE THROAT! YOU HEAR ME, MARINE? I'M GOING TO
PUNCH YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT!"
Leonard aims the weapon at Sergeant Gerheim's heart, caresses the trigger guard, then caresses the trigger...
Sergeant Gerheim is suddenly calm. His eyes, his manner are those of a wanderer who has found his home. He is a man in complete control of himself and of the world he lives in. His face is cold and beautiful as the dark side surfaces. He smiles. It is not a friendly smile, but an evil smile, as though Sergeant Gerheim were a werewolf baring its fangs. "Private Pyle, I'm proud--"
Bang.
The steel buttplate slams into Leonard's shoulder.
One 7.62-millimeter high-velocity copper-jacketed bullet punches Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim back.
He falls.
We all stare at Sergeant Gerheim. Nobody moves.
Sergeant Gerheim sits up as though nothing has happened. For one second, we relax.
Leonard has missed. Then dark blood squirts from a little hole in Sergeant Gerheim's chest.
The red blood blossoms into his white skivvy shirt like a beautiful flower. Sergeant Gerheim's bug eyes are focused upon the blood rose on his chest, fascinated. He looks up at Leonard. He squints. Then he relaxes. The werewolf smile is frozen on his lips.
My menial position of authority as the fire watch on duty forces me to act. "Now, uh, Leonard, we're all your bros, man, your brothers. I'm your bunkmate, right? I--"
"Sure," says Cowboy. "Go easy, Leonard. We don't want to hurt you."
"Affirmative," says Private Barnard.
Leonard doesn't hear. "Did you see the way he looked at her? Did you? I knew what he was thinking. I knew. That fag pig and his dirty--"
"Leonard..."
"We can kill you. You know that." Leonard caresses his rifle. "Don't you know that Charlene and I can kill you all?"
Leonard aims his rifle at my face.
I don't look at the rifle. I look into Leonard's eyes.
I know that Leonard is too weak to control his instrument of death. It is a hard heart that kills, not the weapon. Leonard is a defective instrument for the power that is flowing through him. Sergeant Gerheim's mistake was in not seeing that Leonard was like a glass rifle which would shatter when fired. Leonard is not hard enough to harness the power of an interior explosion to propel the cold black bullet of his will.
Leonard is grinning at us, the final grin that is on the face of death, the terrible grin of the skull.
The grin changes to a look of surprise and then to confusion and then to terror as Leonard's weapon moves up and back and then Leonard takes the black metal barrel into his mouth.
"NO! Not--"
Bang.
Leonard is dead on the deck. His head is now an awful lump of blood and facial bones and sinus fluids and uprooted teeth and jagged, torn flesh. The skin looks plastic and unreal.
The civilians will demand yet another investigation, of course. But during the investigation the recruits of Platoon 30-92 will testify that Private Pratt, while highly motivated, was a ten percenter who did not pack the gear to be a Marine in our beloved Corps.
Sergeant Gerheim is still smiling. He was a fine drill instructor. Dying, that's what we're here for, he would have said--blood makes the grass grow. If he could speak, Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim would explain to Leonard why the guns that we love don't love back. And he would say, "Well done."
I turn off the overhead lights.
I say, "Prepare to mount." Then: "MOUNT!"
The platoon falls into a hundred racks.
I feel cold and alone. I am not alone. All over Parris Island there are thousands and thousands of us. And, all around the world, hundreds of thousands.
I try to sleep...
In my rack, I pull my rifle into my arms. She talks to me. Words come out of the wood and metal and flow into my hands. She tells me what to do.
My rifle is a solid instrument of death. My rifle is black steel. Our human bodies are bags of blood, easy to puncture and quick to drain, but our hard tools of death cannot be broken.
I hold by weapon at port arms, gently, as though she were a holy relic, a magic wand wrought with interlocking pieces of silver and iron, with a teakwood stock, golden bullets, a crystal bolt, jewels to sight with. My weapon obeys me. I'll hold Vanessa, my rifle. I'll hold her. I'll just hold her for a little while. I will hide in this dark dream for as long as I can.
Blood pours out of the barrel of my rifle and flows up on to my hands. The blood moves.
The blood breaks up into living fragments. Each fragment is a spider. Millions and millions of tiny red spiders of blood are crawling up my arms, across my face, into my mouth...
Silence. In the dark, a h
undred men are breaking in unison.
I look at Cowboy, then at Private Barnard. They understand. Cold grins of death are frozen on their faces. They nod.
The newly minted Marines in my platoon stand to attention, horizontal in their racks, their weapons at port arms.
The Marines wait, a hundred young werewolves with guns in their hands.
I lead:
This is my rifle.
There are many like it, but this one is mine...
Body Count
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...
--Allen Ginsberg, Howl
A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
--William S. Burroughs
Tet: The Year of the Monkey.
Rafter Man and I spend the Vietnamese lunar New Year's Eve, 1968, at the Freedom Hill PX
near Da Nang. I've been ordered to write a feature article on the Freedom Hill Recreation Center on Hill 327 for Leatherneck magazine. I'm a combat correspondent assigned to the First Marine Division. My job is to write upbeat news features which are distributed to the highly paid civilian news correspondents who shack up with their Eurasian maids in big hotels in Da Nang. The ten correspondents in the First Division's Informational Services Office are reluctant public relations men for the war in general and for the Marine Corps in particular. This morning my commanding officer decided that a really inspiring piece could be written about Hill 327, an angle being the fact that Hill 327 was the first permanent position occupied by American forces. Major Lynch thinks I rate some slack before I return to the ISO office in Phu Bai. My last three field operations were real shit-kickers; in the field, a Marine correspondent is just another rifleman. Rafter Man tags along behind me like a kid.
Rafter Man is a combat photographer. He has never been in the shit. He thinks I'm one hard field Marine.
We go into a movie theater that looks like a warehouse and we watch John Wayne in The Green Berets, a Hollywood soap opera about the love of guns. We sit way down front, near some grunts. The grunts are sprawled across their seats and they've propped muddy jungle boots onto the seats in front of them. They are bearded, dirty, out of uniform, and look lean and mean, the way human beings look after they've survived a long hump in the jungle, the boonies, the bad bush.
I prop my boots on the seats and we watch John Wayne leading the Green Beanies. John Wayne is a beautiful soldier, clean-shaven, sharply attired in tailored tiger-stripe jungle utilities, wearing boots that shine like black glass. Inspired by John Wayne, the fighting soldiers from the sky go hand-to-hand with all of the Victor Charlies in Southeast Asia. He snaps out an order to an Oriental actor who played Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek." Mr. Sulu, now playing an Arvin officer, delivers a line with great conviction: "First kill...all stinking Cong...
then go home." The audience of Marines roars with laughter. This is the funniest movie we have seen in a long time.
Later, at the end of the movie, John Wayne walks off into the sunset with a spunky little orphan. The grunts laugh and whistle and threaten to pee all over themselves. The sun is setting in the South China Sea--in the East--which makes the end of the movie as accurate as the rest of it.
Most of the zoomies in the audience are clean-shaven office poges who never go into the field. The poges wear spit-shined boots and starched utilities and Air Force sunglasses. The poges stare at the grunts as though the grunts were Hell's Angels at the ballet.
After the screen loses it color and the overhead lights come on, one of the poges says,
"Fucking grunts...they're nothing but animals..."
The grunts turn around. One grunt stands up. He walks over to where the poges are sitting.
The poges laugh and punch each other and mock the grunt's angry face. Then they are silent.
They stare at the grunt's face. He's smiling now. He's smiling like a man who knows a terrible secret.
The zoomie poges do not ask the grunt to explain why he is smiling. They don't want to know.
Another grunt jumps up, punches the smiling grunt on the arm, says, "Hey, fuck it, Mother. It ain't no big thing. We don't want to waste these assholes."
The smiling Marine takes a step forward, but the smaller man stands in his path.
The poges take advantage of the smiling grunt's delay. They walk backwards up the aisle until they reach the door, then stumble out into sunlight.
I say, "Well, no shit. And they say grunts are killers. You ladies do not look like killers to me."
The smiling grunt is not smiling anymore. He says, "Okay, you son-of-a-bitch..."
"Stand by, Mother," says the small Marine. "I know this shitbird."
Cowboy and I grab each other and wrestle and punch and pound each other on the back. We say, "Hey, you old mother-fucker. How you been? What's happening? Been getting any?
Only your sister. Well, better my sister than my mom, although mom's not bad."
"Hey, Joker, I was hoping I'd never see you again, you piece of shit. I was hoping that Gunny Gerheim's ghost would keep you on Parris Island for-ev-er and that he would give you motivation."
I laugh. "Cowboy, you shitbird. You look real mean. If I didn't know that you're a born poge I'd be scared."
Cowboy grunts. "This is Animal Mother. He is mean."
The big Marine is picking his nose. "You better motherfucking believe it." A belt of machine-gun bullets crisscross the Marine's chest so that he looks like a big Mexican bandit.
I say, "This is Rafter Man. He's not a walking camera store. He's a photographer."
"You a photographer?"
I shake my head. "I'm a combat correspondent."
Animal Mother sneers, exposing rotten canine teeth. "You seen much 'combat'?"
"Hey, don't give me any shit, asshole. My payback is a motherfucker. I got twice as many operations as any grunt in Eye Corps. I'm just scarfing up some bennies. My office is up in Phu Bai."
"Yeah?" Cowboy punches me in the chest. "That's our area. One-Five. Delta Company--the baddest of the bad, the leanest of the lean, the meanest of the mean. We hitched down here this morning. We rate some slack 'cause our squad wasted beaucoup Victor Charlies. Man, we are life takers and heartbreakers. Just ask for the Lusthog Squad, first platoon. We shoot them full of holes, bro. We fill them full of lead."
I grin. "Sergeant Gerheim would be proud to hear it."
"Yeah," Cowboy says, nodding his head. "Yeah, I guess so." He looks away. "I hate Viet Nam. They don't even have horses here. Why, there's not one horse in all of Viet Nam."
Cowboy turns away and introduces us to his squad: Alice, a black man as big as Animal Mother; Donlon, the radioman; Lance Corporal Stutten, honcho of the third fire team; Doc Jay, the squad's Navy corpsman; T.H.E. Rock; and the leader of the Lusthog Squad, Crazy Earl.
Crazy Earl is carrying an M-16 Colt automatic rifle slung on his shoulder, but in his hands is a Red Ryder BB gun. He's as skinny as a death-camp survivor, and his face consists of a long, pointed nose with a hollow cheek on each side. His eyes are magnified by thick lenses and one arm of his gray Marine-issue eyeglasses has been wired back on with too much wire.
He says, "Saddle up," and the grunts start picking up their gear, their M-16's and M-79
grenade launchers and captured AK-47 assault rifles, their ruck-sacks, flak jackets, and helmets. Animal Mother picks up an M-60 machine gun and sets the butt into his hip so that the black barrel slants up at a forty-five-degree angle. Animal Mother grunts. Crazy Earl turns to Cowboy and says, "We better be moving, bro. Mr. Shortround will punch our hearts out if we're late."
Cowboy is picking up his gear. "That's affirmative, Craze. But you got to talk to Joker, man.
We were on the island together. He'll write you up and make you famous."
Crazy Earl looks at me. There is no expression on his face. "There it is. They call me Crazy Earl. Gooks love me until I blow them away. Then they don't love me anymore."
I grin. "Ther
e it is."
Crazy Earl grins, gives me a thumbs-up, says, "Moving, Cowboy," and then leads his squad out of the theater.
Cowboy punches me on the shoulder. "That's my fearless leader, bro. I'm the first fire-team leader. I'll be squad leader soon. I'm just waiting for Craze to get wasted. Or maybe he'll just go plain fucking crazy. That's how Craze got to be honcho. Ol' Stoke, he was our honcho before Craze. Ol' Supergrunt. Went stark raving. Pretty soon it'll be my turn."
"Hey, you keep your shit together, Cowboy. You know you're a fool. You know you can't take care of yourself. Remember how easy it was for me to zap you when Sergeant Gerheim made me play sniper? I mean, the Crotch ought to fly your mom over here so that she can go into the bush with you."
Cowboy takes a few steps toward the door, turns, waves goodbye, grins.
I give him the finger.
After Cowboy and his squad are gone, Rafter Man and I watch a "Pink Panther" cartoon.
Then we pick up our weapons and head for the PX, which looks like another warehouse. We buy junk food; pogey bait.
As we wait to pay for our pogey bait with military payment certificates, Rafter Man tries to find some words. "Joker, I want...I want to go out. I want to go out into the field. I been in country for almost three months. Three months. All I do is take hand-shake shots at award ceremonies. That's number ten, the worst. I'm bored. A high-school girl could do my job."
He gives MPC's to a pretty Vietnamese cashier.
Outside, an apprentice Viet Cong forces me to submit to a boot shine while his older sister exhibits her breasts to Rafter Man.
"Relax, Rafter. You owe it to yourself. You'll be in the field soon enough."
"Come on, Joker, cut me a huss. How can I teach geography if I never see the world? Take me to Phu Bai. Okay?"
"Right," I say. "And then you'll get yourself wasted the first day you're in the field and it'll be my fault. Your mom will find me after I rotate back to the World. Your mom will beat the shit out of me. That's a negative, Rafter. I'm not a sergeant, I'm only a corporal. I'm not responsible for your scrawny little ass."
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