The Five Fingers

by Gayle Rivers

  Tan and I killed everyone on the south side of the village, and Prather and Jackson dashed in from the north to find where the grenade had come from. Prather leapt up the steps and piled into the building where we had heard the most noise from the peasants. I heard screams and fighting inside. The peasants were killing Prather. I dashed across the clearing, firing from my hip through the sides of the buildings. Tan and I arrived together and burst inside. To find Prather untouched.

  "They were killing VC," he shouted. "They were prisoners."

  Three bodies lay on the floor, drenched in blood. Their heads were battered and their limbs twisted grotesquely. I glanced about and saw two more bodies.

  "Someone was firing through the wall," Prather said. "Killed two of these people."

  "The place is secure," Jackson shouted from outside.

  "See about Wiley and Morrosco," I told him.

  Tan was conversing with two old men. Everyone else was sobbing and wailing.

  "They want to go into the next building," he said.

  "Let them."

  I followed them outside. Tan went inside with the old men. I was just about to walk over to Jackson

  when Tan came running out. He grabbed the veranda and vomited bile from an empty stomach. I walked up the steps.

  Through the door, I saw several teen-age boys. The two old men were standing over one, pulling at the wooden stakes that had been driven through all their hands and feet. The flesh had been slashed open up and down their bodies, and they had been disemboweled. The old men were not crying. I turned away.

  "They're alive!" Jackson shouted.

  I ran to his side. I half expected the peasants to set into me for the two I had killed, but they were very docile. They had seen enough carnage to fill their lives.

  Morrosco and Wiley were both unconscious, but Wiley was about to come around, so he was the priority. Jackson rolled him over, then drew back in horror.

  "His face has been blown apart."

  "Tan," I called out, "tend to Morrosco. Jackson, help me drag Wiley away from the flames."

  Half the hamlet was ablaze, and the heat beat on us unbearably. Wiley's clothes had been blown off his back, and his head was bathed in blood. We dragged him some distance away, then I turned to treat his wounds. I almost screamed.

  Wiley's left eye was hanging out of the socket, suspended on his cheek by the optic nerve. I drew in deeply with my lungs to steady my nerves. I had no idea what to do. The scene around me was absolute chaos ... the building aflame . . . peasants running aimlessly about . . . Prather searching frantically for more Viet Cong. I glanced over to Tan, who had ripped Morrosco's uniform open to get at the wounds. Morrosco had caught shrapnel in his back and all up and down his leg. It filled him: his buttocks, his abdomen, his groin. His penis was torn. Blood was spilling out everywhere.

  The peasants were gathering their belongings on the run and dropping off for us what we could use; food, water, clean cloth. They had to disappear into the

  bush before another Viet Cong unit murdered them all. They tore about, they snatched up chickens and tied their feet, they grabbed everything they could carry, and faded into the jungle. To mingle with another village, I guess. Only they knew where they could go. A few stayed behind and helped with Morrosco. It was useless trying to remove the shrapnel. Prather snatched some clean clothing off a woman who started to argue, then ran on. He bound strips over what was left of Morrosco's uniform.

  I had Wiley on my hands, and the only man who would know what to do was Morrosco. Wiley began to come around. We had no morphine.

  "Tan, you and Jackson hold him down."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know."

  I had decided to put his eye back, but I did not know how to get hold of it. It did not hang out far, just over the lip of the lower eyelid; it hardly cleared the front of the eye. But the eye socket was bleeding profusely. Blood vessels in the eye itself had burst and were discharging blood.

  I tried to take the eyeball in my fingers, but it slipped loose and wobbled on the end of the optic nerve. I knew not to touch the optic nerve or the retina, but beyond that I was helpless. Then Wiley was conscious. And this guy had guts.

  "I'm blind," he said. "I'm blind. No. I can see! I can see something."

  He must have been seeing a little out of his other eye, though it was covered in blood as well and swelling shut from the bruising.

  "Everything is red," he said.

  "Can you hear me?" I asked.

  "Yes, but I can't see anything. Only red. I see a glow. It hurts."

  He tried to raise one arm to shield his face from the flames. I propped him up against me and pulled the shreds of his shirt up around his face. Jackson grabbed a burning stick for light

  "Listen to me. A concussion grenade hit you in the back of the head It knocked one of your eyes out.*'

  "I'm going to be blind."

  "listen. The eye is still there. Tm going to put it back in. You've got to help."

  I did not know whether to take it in my hand or in a rag or what. Wiley began to tremble. He started to shake all over uncontrollably. If I did not do something soon, he would go into shock and die. I lowered him across my knee and cradled his head in my arms. I waited. And waited. And I thought, Jesus, I can go on like this forever, thinking about how I am going to do it. I cupped his eye in the palm of my hand.

  "My head!" he screamed. "The back of my head! I can't stand it!"

  "You're making it harder for me!" I shouted over his screams. "Open your eyes as wide as you can."

  He tried. His eyebrows went up. One eye opened. And the other eye socket never opened; it was covered in bits of loose skin that just hung there.

  I lowered his head and tilted the eye into the socket. The eye went in from the bottom and fell under the loose flesh. I pressed gently with the palm of my hand. The eye popped out. I put it in again and held my hand over it for ten seconds. I lifted my hand. The pupil looked straight at me, then the eyeball rotated inward until I saw only white. There was nothing more I could do. I had blinded him.

  "It's in now," I said. "But you can't see anything now."

  "I can't see out of either eye now." "Try to open your eyes," I said, not really knowing why. "Try as hard as you can."

  He strained until he screamed again. The eyelids fluttered, then opened slightly. As I watched, the eyeball began to center. The socket was weeping profusely, washing and lubricating the eye. The iris and pupil surfaced, moved a bit more, then the movement stopped off center. At least he might have some sight.

  We bandaged his hair back and left the eye to bleed and weep.

  I turned to Morrosco, who was now conscious. Most of the bleeding had been stemmed, but the groin wounds were being poisoned by uncontrollable dysentery. To my astonishment, Morrosco could stand. Even walk. We left.

  The unit was dying. We carried Wiley, sometimes three of us, sometimes four. He tried to walk, but it was hopeless with him stumbling into everything. Dysentery was weakening Tan and me by the hour. Tan had the first signs of malaria, already well advanced in Prather. The symptoms had shown a day or two earlier in the latter; he was shaking and trembling without ceasing now, suddenly seized by chills or fits of raging fever. Jackson was walking, but his leg was badly infected. My wounds were infected. My leg was as stiff as if it were made of wood. We were all in the latter stages of malnutrition; our eyes, sunk deep into their sockets, were surrounded by pink swollen flesh that contrasted with the blackness of our faces. Our bodies had exhausted the ability to fight decay, to heal us from within; the slightest abrasion meant instant infection. The blow from the rifle across Mor-rosco's face had raised a great bruise that was covered with pepper spots where poison was pushing against the skin. Tan had lost almost complete use of his arm; it was paralyzed from the elbow joint to the shoulder. The flesh was dying around the wound on Prather's arm. Jackson had once been lean and wiry; now he walked bent and stooped, like a man who ha
d aged forty years. I did not expect Morrosco to recover, nor Wiley. How much longer could the rest of us go on?

  Morrosco began to cry. From pain, from exhaustion, from the sheer ordeal of it all. He cried like a little boy, tears running down his face as if he had been hit by his sister. I said nothing, but I hated him for it. My hatred was the only emotion within my grasp now. I was hardened to every circumstance; I had met

  it head-on, and I defeated it, until finally there was nothing left to fight with but insensitivity. To myself. To other people. My hatred subsided. I felt compassion for the poor dying boy.

  It was too gfeat an ordeal to talk. Conversation was reduced to checking one another's condition. Til carry that. Help me with this.

  Daylight came, and I saw clearly the state we were in. Our uniforms mirrored our physical condition. I had no shirt, just pieces of cloth that clung to me in several places. I threw those aside. Morrosco's shirt hung in tatters like that of a circus clown. Fatigue legs were missing entirely or flapping loosely as we walked. The canvas of our boots was torn in a dozen places. We had not had our boots off for weeks, because our feet would have run away from us, would have swollen immediately, and we would not have got them back on. If any man's feet had packed up, he was finished.

  We could not gain Highway 9 immediately because it was elevated high above the river and passed over it in a narrow ravine. To join it, we had to leave the river. I sent the others ahead and dropped behind to fill our canteens.

  I started to dip my canteen into a still backwater when by the early morning light I caught my reflection in the surface. I set the canteen aside and stared at the image before me. What had I become?

  My precision was breaking down. Back at the village, I had mouthed off at the gun and needlessly killed two people, something I would never have done if I had been me. My mind was slipping. I needed time for mental analysis, to pull myself together, to be on my own. I was shattered. For the first time, I noticed that my hands were trembling. I could not stop them shaking. All of a sudden, I wanted something . . . a fuller life than I had known.

  I sat for a while, looking into the pool. I saw faces of people I had known before I had got into this thing. Snatches of scenes from my childhood drifted by, times as a boy when I had stopped to take account

  of myself. I began to think of the soft parts of life, moments of pure pleasure ... the beauty of looking at snow ... the beauty of catching fish in the river . . . the beauty of being with someone. Beautiful things I had once enjoyed and almost taken for granted, and now I might never see again, came rushing back. I saw a dog at play, and a horse being chased by a foal around a green field. I met someone, and being with her instilled in me a great appreciation of the beauty that was everywhere around me.

  It also made me recognize the other extremes of life. The idiots and the fanatics who had gotten me to the side of this river. J found myself asking if we were among those idiots and fanatics. And this jolted me back to the present. Perfectionism. I had been hunting for the word. It was this we were losing. We were not used to making mistakes . . . were not used to seeing someone muck up bringing a man down with his knife ... or getting careless with his weapon. I recalled the perfection with which I had attacked the mission three months earlier. Three months! We had been in this for three months. I had accepted my orders with total confidence; I could do the job. I saw us sitting on that hillside in China, when my killer instinct had been tuned and balanced in a most perfect way. And then I saw the way we had blown a village apart. We had destroyed and killed with such . . . relish. It was too much.

  I caught up with the others. We moved out on a trail that would carry us to Highway 9. Because of our condition, we were not pointing but moving close together.

  "Freeze," Jackson said. "Booby trap."

  We stopped in our tracks. Jackson had his rifle on his shoulder, his finger on the trigger. I could not see the booby trap. But I could see the fear on people's faces. We were in grotesque positions; standing on one leg, leaning forward, bending to one side. Everyone was afraid to move, to blink. I was waiting for the thing to happen, because maybe it had already been set off.

  Maybe we were already dead and just waiting for it to happen.

  The stop by the river had calmed me, gotten some things out of my system. I had regained some presence of min d. But the tension in the others was going to kill us. Everyone wanted to do something quickly. That really got to me. These were guys who had acted coolly for three months in moments of extreme duress. And I saw the panic in their faces. Maybe it had been there before, and I had ignored it. Morrosco whimpered. He must have felt things ripping into his body. But nothing happened. He stopped. We grew completely silent.

  "Everybody stay put and stay cool," I said, not feeling cool myself. "What is it?"

  "Strings left and right," Jackson said.

  "Height?"

  "My rifle barrel."

  "I can't see anything."

  "It's under the loop."

  I was third in line, with Morrosco in front of me. He was trembling so badly I thought he might fall down.

  "Morrosco," I said sharply, "unlock your knees. Breathe deeply. You're going to be all right. For God's sake, don't move. I'm coming forward, Jackson," I said and started inching my way toward him.

  "Don't move! Don't move!" Jackson shouted.

  "I'm clear," I said and kept coming.

  "You're not clear!" he screamed.

  Then I saw the string stretched across his barrel. I followed it with my eye. It went out to a nearby limb and crossed back over the path. Behind me. I had walked underneath it. We all had; Jackson and Morrosco and I were so bent and crippled we had passed under a cord set to catch us at the throat. Jackson's rifle barrel had caught it on the second crossing; the weapon was tipped back under the tension, because the trigger needed a body weight to trip it.

  "Don't move your feet," I ordered. "Crouch down. Watch for head-high wires. And trip wires."

  I saw the string loop off around a tree, then I could not see a damn thing. We all stood there, trying to figure this device out. Then very slowly I made my way out to the tree around which the twine was looped. The sweat was crawling off me. Never taking my eyes off the line, I worked my way around the tree. My boot came up against something. I looked down. My toe was resting against a branch that had been bent off the same tree and driven into the ground. The line would be attached somewhere to the end of it.

  "I've found it!" I yelled out.

  I followed the branch to where it entered the ground. Beyond, a line of earth had been turned where the string was obviously buried and anchored with something heavy I had not yet spotted. I still did not understand how the device worked. The line of earth led to a distant tree, where the string had some job to do, but I bloody well was not going to walk that far to find out what it was about.

  I scraped a bit of dirt away from the end of the branch, and the earth started to move next to my hand. The branch had been anchored, not the string, and it was breaking out. Slowly the line of soil began to shake.

  "Take your rifle off the string!" I shouted.

  Jackson did it without hesitation, with complete trust in me. The limb stopped moving.

  "Make your way over here, Jackson. Watch out for trip wires."

  He crawled to me on his stomach while I waited for the body vibration to set something off.

  "I've seen this son-of-gun before," he said. "That line will lead to where a lot more lines are gathered. They'll be tied to pins in mines scattered all over the joint, probably on the end of a branch. That string across the path is holding a stick in place somewhere."

  I searched along it again, and on the far side of

  the tree I found a wooden pin, restrained by the line, gripping another branch. This branch went over our heads, and it was connected to the line in the ground. One of the two lines would lift a cluster of mines over our head and set them off at the same time. But for some reason, both lines had s
topped moving.

  We edged under the wire and inched our way to the road, watching for trip wires at every step. We were bathed in sweat and shaking when we got clear.

  "I'm going to set that thing off," Jackson said.

  "Don't," I said. "You don't know what other devices you might set off."

  "I don't care. I'm going to do it anyway."

  We moved to the far side of the track. He lobbed a grenade behind him, then hit the ground. The earth erupted. Four or five clusters of these things came flying out and blew the jungle apart, showering us with stones, dirt, and branches. No one could have survived it.

  The dust settled. We got up and were brushing ourselves off when we heard voices and the sound of men running. A dozen guys came piling down the road toward the booby trap. They must have set it, and they thought we were all dead. We lay beside the road, and when they came alongside us, I launched two grenades into their midst. Half of them were killed on impact. One guy went over backward, then scrambled back to his feet. He began a frenzied search for his weapon. As his eyes darted down the road, they met mine, then stopped and looked me square in the face. He let out a great roar of fear and hatred, then reached for his rifle at his feet.

  I was so fatigued, all I could think was, here we go again. I found myself switching my weapon on single shot. And I stood up in the road and exposed myself.

  It was completely wild. It was against every instinct and all my training. The guy fumbled with his weapon, trying desperately to draw a bead to me. And

  I was filled with anger for this man, a great loathing that started down in my boots and coursed through me. I did not hate the soldier on the road; he was just a face. It was a searing wrath for what I found myself in.

  The scene became a fantasy acted out in slow motion. The man's features became so clearly defined that I could see the stubble on his chin. His body started churning over, and his eyes grew so wide they almost popped out of their sockets. I watched the man clamoring for his life, trying to beat the bullet he knew was on its way.