Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  There was on the form we filled out for each body a place where we were asked to list the cause of death. We dutifully filled in these blanks with the requested answers—mortar fire, gunshot, bayonet wound—but between us we discussed the more precise reasons. Although he had only basic medical training, Digger was a deeply-knowledgeable student of thanatology. He understood death's methods and means, and his careful attention to the bodies that passed through our doors was due in equal parts to his firm belief that every man deserved to be treated respectfully and to his constant desire to learn more. The arrival of an 18-year-old with fatal shrapnel wounds caused by the faulty placement of a Claymore mine (a tragedy made even more absurd by the fact that the mines are clearly labeled FRONT

  TOWARD ENEMY ) presented him with an opportunity to observe firsthand the effects of uniformly-sized lead shot tearing through human flesh and bone at high speed. A body fished from a river two days after death was a lesson in the ability of water and the native fishes to transform a man's face into something unrecognizable.

  Digger was less interested in the cataloging of the personal effects that were found on the bodies, and so we often worked in tandem. While he attended to the corpses, I attended to what remained of their lives. More often than not, though, Digger talked as he worked, describing his discoveries and outlining his theories about them in detail. I, in turn, told him what I found in the pockets and rucksacks of the men whose wounds he was exploring. As a result, we often assembled quite a full—if not entirely verifiable—picture of the soldiers whose remains had been delivered into our hands. The things men carry into war say much about who they are. There are the obvious: photos of loved ones, religious talismans, love letters from girlfriends and wives. I removed dozens of these items from pockets and wallets, so many that I was more surprised on the occasions when I did not find them. More interesting were the objects that appeared unexpectedly. One soldier had tucked into a pants pocket a PEZ dispenser featuring the head of Bullwinkle the Moose, the chamber still half full of candy. Another wore around his wrist a bracelet made of the metal pieces taken from a Monopoly game: the tiny shoe, dog, wheelbarrow, cannon, and others linked together on a length of plain white string. A third had in his chest pocket a small envelope containing a lock of coarse dark hair tied with a pink ribbon and a picture of the soldier standing beside a chestnut-colored horse.

  I wondered about these things, these charms and tokens. Were they simply reminders of lives left behind, small beacons of light meant to guide the soldiers back? Or did the men ascribe to them some level of magical power, some supernatural ability to grant protection against harm? If so, what did it mean that they had failed? Was it the fault of the magic, or had the faith of the makers or wearers in their potency been lacking? As I put these items into the bags, along with the eyeglasses, watches, and wedding bands, I marveled at the ways in which men put their faith in something apart from their guns and their fellow soldiers. The army had taught us all to depend only on our skills and on our teamwork, but here was evidence that most of us needed something more.

  I wondered what the North Vietnamese soldiers carried with them, if they, too, had pockets filled with letters and photographs and small gifts pressed into their hands by loved ones in the hopes that they would bring luck and protection. I imagined my NVA counterpart checking the clothes of his fallen comrades and sorting the bits and pieces of their lives into bags and envelopes to be delivered to grieving families. We were both, it seemed to me, the historians of death. In August my 20th birthday passed, but I didn't remember until three days after, when I was checking an inventory sheet and realized that it was the 14th and that I had left my teenage years behind without celebrating. That night, Digger and some of my other buddies threw me a makeshift party in an underground bunker, complete with Carling Black Label beer on ice and the Rolling Stones on the turntable. My present was a pack of Marlboros that contained not regular cigarettes but enormous joints filled with Hanoi Gold. Each one was exactly the size and shape of a normal cigarette, but the pot inside was more potent than any North Carolina burley tobacco could ever hope to be. After just three hits I was gone, and the rest of the evening was a hazy dream of laughing, drinking, and swapping dirty jokes with my friends. A far cry from the cozy birthday parties I used to share with Jack. It was a celebration of men, and I felt very grown-up indeed.

  I felt less so the next morning, when I woke up in my own hootch with a pounding headache and a mouth tasting of stale beer and ash. Slowly I realized that some of the drumming was actually the sound of rain hitting the walls and roof, and the prospect of another wet, muddy day did nothing to improve my mood. I rolled over, tried to go back to sleep, then gave up when I heard the roar of a plane coming in for a landing. Groaning and trying not to move my head too much, I got up and pulled on my clothes. When I reached the GR building, Digger was already at work on a body. Even from the door, I could tell that there was something unusual about it. The skin was discolored, and the smell in the air was stronger than usual. I coughed, and Digger looked back at me.

  "You've got to see this," he said as I walked toward the table. "But you're going to want the Vicks." I stopped and took the jar of Vicks VapoRub from the table on which we stored some of our tools. Opening it, I used my finger to scoop some out and dab it under my nose. Instantly the menthol-camphor scent filled my head, opening my sinuses and erasing not only the peculiar stench in the air but the remaining scent of beer and hash. Normally I hated the stuff, as I associated it with having to do particularly unpleasant work, but that morning it was a welcome relief. My nose girded, I approached Digger and the body he was peering at intently. He moved aside, and I saw that it was a fairly small man. His skin, what there was left of it, was covered in a viscous black substance that looked like tar or burned sugar. I'd never seen anything like it before, and looked questioningly at Digger.

  "Napalm," he said.

  "Holy shit," I said. "Is he one of our guys?"

  Digger shook his head. "Vietnamese," he answered. "But he's a local. Used to help our guys out as a guide." I'd seen napalm used before, and had been impressed by its ability to burn down everything it touched. I'd witnessed huge chunks of forest reduced to blackened stumps in a matter of minutes. But I'd never seen its effects on a human body before. Looking at the charred corpse in front of me, I couldn't even imagine what his death must have been like.

  "You know all those saints and martyrs and witches and whatnot they burned at the stake back in the Middle Ages?" asked Digger as he scraped at some of the black substance on the man's abdomen. It fell away, revealing a raw window of a hole, the view through which made my stomach lurch.

  "Yeah," I answered, not understanding what the question had to do with anything. "If they were lucky, they had themselves a big roaring fire," Digger continued, examining an area on the man's left thigh. "A big fire with lots of smoke. That way, the carbon monoxide knocked them out right away and they died before the fire did too much damage."

  "And if they weren't lucky?" "Then they ended up like this guy," he said. "A small fire and a slow death. Lots of pain." He stopped prodding the man's skin and stepped back so that I could view the full extent of the damage done to his body.

  "Steel melts at 2400 degrees," Digger told me. "Napalm burns at something between 1800 and 3600 degrees, depending on what you use to ignite it. It sticks to everything, so once it's on you, you can't get away from it. It only stops once it's burned itself out."

  "And by then you're dead," I said. "That's the kicker," said Digger. "Usually, you're not. You're just burned. It hurts like a son of a bitch, but you think maybe you'll live. Burns are funny like that. Unless they're really bad, you don't die right away. But what happens is, over the next couple of days you lose a lot of blood mass while your body tries to heal itself. And if you still don't die, then it starts eating up the infected parts and putting it all back into your blood, so you die that way."

  "You think he lived a few d
ays?" I asked. Digger sighed. "I know he did. He and his buddy were out in the jungle doing God knows what, got surprised by a napalm burn the boys were doing around a place they thought the NVA might be using as a camp. He got splashed, but his buddy didn't. His friend got him away from the smoke, but he couldn't do anything about the burns. He held out four days. If you ask me, his buddy would have done him a favor to leave him in there."

  "What can we do for him?"

  "Not much. Clean him up a little. Get the worst of the gunk off. It's more to show his wife and kids that he was a kind of hero than anything else." I looked around the room for any other bodies. "What else have we got?" I asked Digger. "He's it for now," he answered. "You want to skip this one? It's okay."

  I looked at the dead man. I did want to leave. The savagery done to him by the napalm was

  terrible to see, worse somehow than the usual gunshot wounds and even the grisly results of a mine or mortar hit. His body was simply blackened, the skin cracked like the skin of a roasted animal. I imagined him praying for death and wondering why it wouldn't come.

  "I'll stay," I told Digger. Together we washed the body, careful not to do further damage to the skin. Digger was right that there wasn't much we could do, but still I felt better as we cleaned away at least some of the napalm's black kisses. No one looking at the body would ever believe the man had died of anything other than unnatural causes, but in some small way I felt we were giving him back at least a little of his humanity by treating him as more than just a burned husk.

  Digger was showing me how to stitch up the worst of the open wounds when I heard a voice behind us say, "They told me I'd find you in here. When did you turn into Doctor Frankenstein?" Hearing something familiar in the voice, I turned around. Andy stood just inside the door, shit-eating grin on his face.

  "What?" he said. "Aren't you glad to see me?" "What are you doing here?" I asked him, still not really believing it was him and not some hallucination brought about by the combination of hash, beer, Vicks, and scent of burned flesh coursing through my blood.

  "Reporting for duty," Andy said. "They needed a helo mechanic, and I'm the best one around." He walked closer, peering at the body on the table. "What's that, lunch?" he joked, laughing heartily. I saw Digger turn away and busy himself with something on the table. I was embarrassed by Andy's lack of compassion, and made a note to apologize to Digger later.

  "Why don't I show you around when I'm done," I suggested to Andy.

  "Great," he said. "I just got in an hour or so ago. When I heard you were here, I came to look you up. I haven't even found my hootch yet."

  I remembered the sound of the plane that had woken me up. Andy must have been on it, I realized. If I'd known, would I have been there to meet him?

  "I'll finish up here," Digger said before I could answer that question. "You introduce your buddy to Hotel Frenchie."

  "Thanks, Dig," I said. "I'll see you later." Andy and I walked out into a steamy soup of a morning. The rain had stopped, but the air was still heavy and wet. Andy gamely marched through the mud like a kid after a rainstorm, looking around at everything.

  "You guys see a lot of action?" he asked me.

  "Enough," I told him.

  "Good," he said. "The last thing I want to do is sit around on my ass all day. I didn't sign up for that."

  "You'll be busy," I assured him. "A lot of slicks come in and out of here." "I'm putting my name in for door gunner," said Andy. "I like fixing the birds, but I'd rather be shooting at Charlie. You had any kills yet?"

  I shook my head. "I'm mainly in the GR or stores," I said. "I do my share of patrols, but so far they've been clean."

  "Too bad," said Andy, sounding genuinely sorry for me. Then he asked, "So, what's the pussy situation up here?"

  "The what?" I said.

  "You know," said Andy, grabbing his crotch and squeezing. "Me love you long time." "Oh," I replied. "There's not much of that as far as I can tell. Guys usually wait 'til they've got R&R."

  "Shit," he said. "I'm fucking horny as hell. I had this hot little grunt groupie while I was at Eustis, but she up and married some jarhead last month. I haven't had any since." I knew what he was asking. He wouldn't come out and say it, but I could tell he was thinking about our times at Penn. I knew I should just ignore him, let him think I had no idea what he was hinting around at. But the truth was, I hadn't had any in a long time either. I'd more or less buried those feelings in the red mud of Quan Loi. But Andy's reappearance had stirred them up again.

  "You want to see my hootch?" I asked him after calculating the chances of my bunkmates being on duty and finding them high enough to chance it.

  Andy grinned. "Lead the way," he said. As I'd suspected, the hootch was empty. It didn't take long before Andy's pants were around his ankles and I was on my knees, taking him into my throat. My back was to the door, and I knew that at any moment, one of my roomies could walk in and find me sucking Andy's cock. It was a foolish risk to take, but I was driven by a need more intense than the fear of discovery. I needed to claim Andy once more, and this was the only way I knew how to do it. I told myself, as I had so many times before, that his pretense of casualness was a distraction for the feelings he couldn't express. What was important was that he'd come back to me.

  He came quickly, and as I felt his dick throb with the heavy pulse of release, I was surprised to find myself coming as well. I hadn't even touched my cock, yet I was emptying a load into my pants. With nowhere else to go, the stickiness slid down my shaft, coating it with wet heat. Unexpectedly, my thoughts flashed back to the night seven years before when I'd come in my pajamas while sleeping next to Jack.

  Andy pulled out of my mouth and zipped himself up. Still slightly dazed by both my orgasm and the conflicting memories it brought with it, I was slower in getting to my feet. I had just stood when the door to the hootch opened and two soldiers entered.

  "Hey, Ned," one of them said. "Who's your buddy?"

  "Oh," I said. "This is Ja—, um, Andy. We were in basic together."

  Andy nodded. My bunkmates welcomed him as they would any new arrival, oblivious to my disorientation. Andy, too, seemed unaware of my momentary confusion. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, "I should go check in. I'll see you later, okay?"

  "Sure," I said. "Later." After he left, I sat down on my bunk, listening to my roommates talk but hearing nothing. The warmth in my pants quickly turned to an uncomfortable coldness as the cum dried and glued my cock to the hair of my legs. When I moved, tiny fingers of pain pinched and scratched at me as the matted hair separated from my skin. But the taste of Andy was still in my mouth, and that made me forget everything else.

  CHAPTER 27

  There is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who works with the dead in which a corpse will arrive with, or depending on how much time has elapsed since death, develop during examination, an erection. This can be unsettling to the uninitiated. You do not, after all, generally expect the deceased to display an inclination toward the erotic. But they sometimes do. The cause has no supernatural origins; it is simply the result of pooling blood settling in the genitals. Morticians, in a wonderful display of black humor, call it angel lust.

  This is the effect that Andy had on me. Having buried my desires out of necessity, I found them resurrected again, against my will, by his presence. I was at first a reluctant participant in my own delusion, stubbornly refusing to admit that I wanted him. Once roused, however, my need grew in strength until I was thinking about him almost constantly. He, of course, responded by pretending to be completely unaware of my love for him. As he had in college, he came to me when he needed release, but withheld any real affection.

  He was quickly welcomed into base life, becoming a favorite almost immediately and making friends with anyone who came into contact with him. His work on the slicks was first rate, and did not go unnoticed by his superiors. After a month, he got his wish and began training to be a door gunner, and a few weeks later he flew hi
s first mission. When he returned, he had the elated, almost frightening, glow of a hunter whose foray into the woods has been most successful.

  "You should have seen it, Ned," he told me that night over a beer in the enlisted men's club. "Those chinks were running like roaches, man, and I was just firing away. It was like one of those games at a carnival. Bam. Bam. Bam. We've got a winner, here's your teddy bear."

  "They're not chinks," I told him.

  "Gooks. Chinks. Slants. It's all the same to me," he said, missing my dig at his geographic misstep. "If it's yellow, I shoot it." The door opened and a couple of Andy's new chopper buddies came in. They sat down at our table and immediately started talking about their day. I listened, nursing my beer, and wondered how I could want a man like Andy, who didn't seem to see that I was in love with him and, worse, who seemed to have become a man who derived pleasure from killing. Was this the same man I'd talked philosophy with only nine months earlier? It hardly seemed possible.