Old Man

by David A. Poulsen

  After we finished eating, the old man dug out the briefcase again. This time he didn’t bother with the map. He mostly seemed interested in the photographs. He’d look at a photo, then at the hill, craning his head around like he was trying to get some sort of bearings. Mr. Vinh was mostly ignoring him. Kind of nodding off.

  I watched, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Okay, let’s go.” The old man stood up. He didn’t pick up the duffel bag this time. Just moved it over beside Mr. Vinh, who hadn’t moved a muscle except to unfasten the machete from his belt and hand it to the old man. It was obvious the old man and I were on our own from here on.

  I wasn’t sure I liked that. Mr. Vinh knew his way around, that was clear. The old man hadn’t been here for forty years, couldn’t possibly remember. I was hoping he wouldn’t get us lost or up to our chins in quicksand or something. Is there quicksand in the jungle? Probably — right next to the unexploded ordnance.

  He took the briefcase, and I grabbed the backpack and one canteen.

  “Let’s go,” he said again.

  We started across the lower face of the hill going up a bit of an incline as we walked. Okay, first of all, Hill 453 wasn’t really a hill. More like a mountain that hadn’t totally grown up.

  I discovered this as the old man and I were working our way up the slope. It wasn’t too bad at first, not real steep and not tons of jungle growth. Neither of those lasted long. It got steep pretty fast, and at about the same time, it seemed like we were having to fight our way through major growth.

  The old man stopped to catch his breath. Or maybe it was to let me catch my breath. “Triple canopy. That’s what you call jungle that’s got growth along the ground, at about head height and overhead as well. We’re in triple canopy here. Makes for hard going.”

  Ya think?

  A couple of times I lost sight of him but could still hear the swish-whack of the machete as he carved a path up the side of the hill.

  It wasn’t long until I couldn’t see the sky at all. And a weird thing was happening. I was scared. Okay, maybe not scared but nervous. I still didn’t know what had happened here, but I had this strange feeling, like when you have the flu, and you’re hot, and then you’re cold. It just felt like this was a bad place.

  I tried to stay behind the old man, but the truth is he could go up some places I couldn’t. Though the rain had stopped, the ground was muddy and slippery, and a couple of times I went down to my knees. There were some big palms to my right, and I figured I could use the leaves to pull myself up the slope.

  I yelled. Loud. And jerked my hand off the first leaf. I was bleeding. The old man slid back down the hill to where I was and looked at my hand.

  “You’re okay. It’ll bleed a bit, but it’s not poisonous or anything. I should have told you about those. Nipa palms. The leaves have sharp edges. But I guess you already figured that out.”

  He pulled a not-very-clean piece of cloth out of a pocket and wrapped it around my hand. “This won’t stop the bleeding, but it should keep some of the mud out of the cut. The bleeding will stop on its own.”

  He pointed to an area to our left. “It’s not quite as steep over there. We’ll go that way.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re doin’ good, Nate.”

  For some reason I liked hearing him say that. I wasn’t at all sure I was doing good, but I wasn’t doing all that bad either. And I realized something. I hadn’t complained about anything, not really, for at least a couple of days. Ruining my image.

  4

  In the next half hour my guess was that we covered a hundred and fifty yards, maybe less. The only good part was that the old man was having as much trouble as I was. At least I didn’t look like a total jerk trying to get up that hill.

  I’d pretty well forgotten about my hand, but the handkerchief had been a good idea. I lost count of the times I had my hands in the mud up to my wrists trying to get a little further up that slope.

  I lost track of the old man again, this time for longer than the time before. Sometimes I could hear him, and I could see where he’d worked his way up the hill. I tried to follow as closely as I could his exact route. That whole unexploded shells thing had spooked me. I tried to look down too as I scrambled through the mud. But I wasn’t sure that I’d see anything even if it was there. It could be covered in mud. Or buried just far enough to be out of sight.

  For most of this trip I’d been either bored or pissed off that I was there at all. That it was killing my well-planned summer. Now there was something else. There was danger here. An average of five people a day, the old man had said. And they probably weren’t scrambling through a battlefield on their hands and knees.

  I called out a couple of times, but he didn’t answer. I wanted to stop. Every muscle was tired, and I was totally out of breath. Sweat was pouring out of me. And the old man wasn’t answering me.

  Terrific.

  I finally caught up, but only because he’d stopped. As I came up behind him, he was looking around. I couldn’t see that where we were looked any different from where we’d been twenty minutes earlier. And looking ahead, it didn’t look like the next twenty minutes would change much either.

  But something was different. The old man was different. I flopped down on my side, propped myself on one elbow trying to catch my breath. I looked at him. He turned toward me, and what I saw scared me more than the idea of hidden exploding stuff.

  His eyes were open wide, and he was making some kind of moaning noises. I was pretty sure he wasn’t seeing me even though I was five feet away at the most. I thought maybe he was having a heart attack or something. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. What I could do.

  “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t answer me. I tried to get up to where he was, but I kept slipping back. Finally I was able to get my feet against some rocks and push my way up beside him. Both of us were covered in mud.

  He was on his belly now, his head barely off the ground, looking up the slope. I reached out and took his arm. He jumped and grabbed me by the shoulder. Hard. Scared the crap out of me. He was looking at me like he was seeing something else. Maybe someone else. Someone he wanted to hurt.

  “It’s me. It’s me, Nate. Nathan,” I told him.

  I said some other stuff too, but I can’t remember what exactly it was. I still couldn’t tell what was wrong with him. But even through all the mud and stuff, I saw that his face was all changed. There was a look, no, not a look, not an expression, something more than that — it was like his face was all out of shape. Like he was in pain.

  He wasn’t the only one. He still hadn’t let go of my shoulder. And it was starting to hurt like hell.

  “It’s okay. It’s just me, Nate. Your son.”

  It felt weird to hear those last words coming out of my mouth. I managed to get hold of one of the canteens, got the top of off, held it toward him. “Here,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure he understood at first. But finally he let go of my shoulder and took the canteen. He twisted over on his side. Drank like he was someone in the desert. Like people you see in movies, the water rolling down the sides of their mouths.

  5

  After that he started to look more normal, breathe more normal. He passed the canteen back to me, and I took a drink, then twisted the top back on.

  “You okay?” I asked again.

  He didn’t answer, but I thought maybe he nodded his head, just a small nod, but something, I was pretty sure.

  He took some deep breaths, trying to get himself back. He pulled himself off his belly and sat up, still looking around, but his eyes looked more like they usually did. Intense but not crazy. Not like they’d been a couple of minutes before.

  “Over there,” he pointed. “Work our way over there.”

  I looked where he was pointing. Up a little ways and to the right. The jungle growth did seem a little less there. Th
ere was nowhere for him to get by me, so I led the way this time. We slid our way up and over to where he’d indicated, to a bit of a clearing. Not as much mud there. It was steep, but there were a couple of trees, not nipa palms. I sat down in a small depression right next to one of the trees. I could kind of brace myself against the up-slope side to keep from sliding. It was grassy and fairly dry. Better. Almost comfortable.

  We sat there close together, both still breathing heavy, sweating. Looking up the slope.

  I was too tired to talk. I just wanted to breathe, but each breath hurt my chest. It was quite awhile before the old man said anything. When he spoke, it wasn’t much more than a whisper.

  And he wasn’t talking to me. Not really. He was just talking.

  “I was so scared here. So scared. I never knew a person could be as scared as I was that day. I’d been in firefights before, been shelled before, even wounded once, not much more than a scratch, but still I’d been in the heat of battle. I knew what it was like to have people shooting at me, trying to kill me. And I’d been afraid before, being afraid in a battle isn’t being a coward … but nothing like this. Nothing like here.”

  He shifted his weight, leaned back against a tree trunk.

  “It was an alpha-bravo, that’s the term we used for ambush. Bo Doi, Uniformed North Vietnamese Army regulars. Tough, well-trained fighters. Used to fighting in the jungle, and damn good at it.

  “We were Delta Company, two platoons. Ninety men. Our platoon, we called ourselves The Fighting Ninth. Hadn’t really done all that much fighting. A few firefights, not big ones. But this was different, this was something not even the cowboys in our group, the guys who craved action — not even those guys wanted this. I figured Kiner, he was our sergeant, and maybe our lieutenant, maybe those guys had seen this kind of combat before. For the rest of us, this was a whole new ball game. We were scared, and we were fighting for our lives.”

  He spoke slowly, his voice still barely more than a whisper. And it was flat, no emotion. Not like his eyes. His words were telling the story, but it seemed like his eyes were living it.

  “I don’t know how many died in the first minutes. Fifteen, twenty, maybe more. We tried to fight back. Do what we were trained to do. Couldn’t see shit for the dust, the smoke, sure as hell couldn’t see Charlie. But he was out there, above us, on both sides of us. Maybe below us. We didn’t know.”

  The old man stopped talking. Reached for the canteen, took another drink. Poured some over his face. He set the canteen down on the ground between us.

  “The noise is the worst … what I hated most. One minute it’s so quiet you can hear the sweat running down your chest and the next minute you can’t think for the noise. That’s not some bullshit statement. You can not think. Guns, mortars. Guys on both sides yelling. Some screaming. The worst was ‘help me.’ Wounded guys yelled, ‘Medic,’ or ‘I’m hit.’ Dying guys yelled, or they whispered, ‘Help me.’

  “I remember the lieutenant and a radio guy next to me, both of them yelling as loud as they could. Trying to be heard over the noise. Trying to get help. I remember some of it. Blue Water One … This is Blue Water Five … Blue Water One, this is Blue Water Five … Delta Company, Delta Company … Hill 453 south slope, alpha bravo, alpha bravo. Boo koo Bo Doi. Deep serious. Need close air support. Immediate. Repeat. Deep serious … deep shit. Need close air support and dustoff. Can’t give zulu. Need dustoff.

  “But it didn’t matter how much shit we were in. The weather had closed in over us. Low cloud. Nothing that flew could even see the hill, let alone see us, or get our wounded men out. That’s called dustoff. Couldn’t even give a zulu … casualty report. Nobody knew who was dead and who was alive. All we knew was there was a lot fewer of us now than when we started.

  “We got spread out … too far apart. Couldn’t communicate with each other. I saw a guy. Charlie. There were maybe a few hundred of them, and I finally saw one. Bet I fired forty rounds at the son of a bitch. No idea if I hit him.

  “I was sure I was going to die that day. Right here where we are. This is where we dug in, tried to hold on. Still calling for help.

  “I’d been in country for nine months. Lots of search and destroy patrols. That’s what they called it when you went looking for Charlie, so you could shoot his ass. Got wounded on one of those. I was point — the guy at the front.”

  “Is that the scar on your neck?”

  He nodded. “Trouble was the only time you found Charlie was when he wanted you to find him. When he was hidden and ready. Like he was that day. Here. I remember looking back down the hill, and the lieutenant and the radio guy, Cletis, they were both dead.”

  He stopped talking again, took a couple of breaths, had a fit of coughing, then recovered.

  I looked around again. All I could see was jungle. I tried to imagine what it must have been like that day. But I couldn’t, not really. All the movies I’d seen, it had to be like that, right?

  But I knew that what the old man was talking about wasn’t like any movie I’d ever seen. I closed my eyes, but I still couldn’t see it. Scrunched my eyes tighter. And there was … something. So weird. I couldn’t see anything … but it was like I could hear it. Shooting, stuff exploding, people screaming. It scared me and I opened my eyes quick.

  Silence.

  “We’ll rest here.” The old man’s voice. “Let me see the rucksack.”

  I pulled the backpack off my shoulders and passed it to him. He pulled a couple of oranges out of it and handed me one.

  For a few minutes we didn’t say anything, just ate the oranges. When we’d finished, he pulled out a camera and took some pictures of the area around where we were sitting. He didn’t take any pictures of me and didn’t ask me to take any of him. This wasn’t a family holiday at the Grand Canyon.

  He put the camera back in the backpack, pulled out a little folding shovel, and handed it to me.

  “You’re sitting in a foxhole.”

  “Foxhole, that’s what you dug and got down into, right?”

  I looked down at the depression I was sitting in. I guessed it had filled in quite a bit since it was a foxhole for some soldier.

  “Yeah. These ones weren’t very deep. We didn’t have much time. They were still shelling the shit out of us and giving it to us pretty good with AK-47’s at the same time. From over there was the worst.” He pointed to the right. The jungle was thickest there. Maybe it was back then too. “That’s where I saw that first guy I shot at.”

  My butt was sore, and my back was getting stiff, so I shifted my weight. Tried to get more comfortable.

  “Go ahead, dig right there, at the bottom of your foxhole.”

  “What for?”

  “Guys sometimes buried stuff there. Or just left it in the foxhole when they moved out. Or got killed.”

  “I don’t know if I want to.”

  “It’s okay,” he nodded. “Go ahead.”

  I stood up and unfolded the shovel. “Where should I dig?”

  “Anywhere. In the bottom of the hole.”

  I dug. It wasn’t easy. There was grass and roots from the trees and other stuff growing around there. I didn’t really think I’d find anything. And at first I didn’t. But then there was something. I didn’t know what it was; it looked like part of a little tin can or something. There were words on the side, but I couldn’t make them out. I reached down, lifted it out of the hole … handed it to the old man.

  He looked at it, then looked up at me, sort of smiling. “C rations. What we ate when we were in the field came in these little tins. This one was ham and lima beans, the worst shit they ever put in C rations. Every guy hated it. We called it ham and chokers. There were worse names too, but ham and chokers says it real well.”

  He tossed the tin back to me. “Got yourself a souvenir.”

  A souvenir. Something to make me remember a summer I wanted to forget. I handed the tin and the shovel back to him. He put them both in the backpack.

  I sat back
down in the foxhole. “Listen, I’m not pissed off or anything, but I’m still wondering why you brought me here.”

  He did up the backpack, pulled it behind his head, lay back on it. “Sometimes the most important thing that happens in your life isn’t a good thing. This is the most important thing that ever happened to me. I wish I could say it was your mom. Or you. But it was this. I want you to know me. To know me you have to know this.”

  “I don’t get why you were in that war. You … we’re … Canadian.”

  “There were other Canadians who fought in Vietnam.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  The corners of the old man’s mouth turned up just a little. “The truth? I didn’t have anything else to do. My baseball career was over. I’d had a couple of jobs, hated them … I wanted to do something, have an adventure, care about something.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Don’t try to understand it, Nate. I don’t totally myself. I remember reading all this stuff about how if this place became communist, then all these other countries would too. They called it the domino effect. Back then communism, that was a bad word. I guess it still is, but then it seemed like a big deal to stop them from taking over this part of the world. And I thought, ‘yeah, that’s something I can do. That’s the thing I can care about.’”

  He waited for a while before he said, “I had it completely wrong.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  He smiled a bit bigger this time. “You already asked me some things. Quite a few things.”

  “I know. One more.”

  He nodded.

  “In the war museum there were all these photos. A place called My Lai.”

  His eyes narrowed when I said the name. He nodded.

  I wasn’t sure how to say what I wanted to say. Without making him mad. “You ever … you know … ”

  “Was I ever involved in something like My Lai? Is that what you want to know?”

  I looked down at the ground.

  “The answer is no. Nothing like that. My Lai happened after my tour was over, but it made all of us sick. All of us who had tried to do our jobs and knew the whole time that so many people back home hated what we were doing and then those guys go nuts and massacre all those people, those kids … babies … ”