by Tim O'Brien
At first light David made a systematic search of the grassy clearing. He found what was left of Doc Paladino. It was a quiet morning, perfectly still, like a snapshot of reality. Even the grass did not move. Off to the west, David could hear the frothy bubble of the river. Otherwise there was no sound at all. He opened up Doc Paladino's medical pouch, pulled out seven Syrettes of morphine, jabbed himself once in the thigh, popped a penicillin tablet, taped three square bandages over the holes in his boots, slung the canvas pouch over his shoulder, picked up Doc's M-16, and began the long crawl down to the Song Tra Ky.
It took him well over an hour to cover two hundred meters. Twice, he fell into something very much like sleep. Another time he lay watching a pair of jets passing high overhead, their trails parallel in a neon-red sky.
When he reached the river, the morphine had taken him into a new world. It was no longer a war, and he was not shot and not alone and not leaking to death through the feet.
He almost hoped.
He filled his canteens, took a nap, joined Marla on the dance floor, married her afterward, planted lilac bushes in their back yard.
The midday heat brought him out of it. Presently, more or less with resolve, he decided to move downstream. The rest of the platoon had to be hunkered down somewhere. He could not be the only survivor—his luck had never been that good, or that bad.
After a prayer David slipped into the shallow river. The cold felt good for a moment, then it hit the bones of his feet, and both legs seemed to snap, and something blunt and icy struck him between the eyes. For a few seconds all he knew was his own biology. The river was at most three feet deep, barely a river, but the muscular current spun him over and dragged him face-down along the bottom. He felt himself passing out, and then he did, and it was some time later when David found himself tangled up in a web of tree roots along the bank.
He sat up in a foot of water. Directly to his left, almost touching him, Private Borden Manning bobbed on his back, his nose gone, the current fishtailing him against a big gray boulder. Several others floated nearby, caught up in roots and rocks. Sergeant Gil Reiss lay dead on the bank. Tap Hammerlee, Van Skederian, and Alvin Campbell lay side by side farther down the bank, as if on display, their scalps stripped away, their feet too, the stumps shiny and reddish purple in the lurid sunshine.
There were butterflies along the bank. The corpses were naked and badly swollen. They had been killed naked, frolicking, like a Boy Scout troop.
David pulled himself out of the water and moved into the shade of a little betel palm. The carnage was bewildering. He took a Syrette from his pocket, stuck himself again, wiped himself dry with his shirt. White-and-yellow butterflies circled all around him. He danced with Marla Dempsey for a while, scooped up a ground ball, wept at the pain in his legs and at how alone he was and how afraid of dying. Later, he began to count up the dead. Twenty-four hours ago, when they'd stopped for a break in the grassy clearing, there had been seventeen of them altogether, a stripped-down platoon. Now there was no one. Not even himself, because the morphine had made him into a child, and because he was dying fast. And it was his own fault. He had failed to put out flank security; he had permitted half the platoon to move down to the river for a swim; he had said nothing, and done nothing, when Ortiz turned on his transistor radio to get news about the moon shot. Taken together, or taken separately, these blunders had violated even the most minimal field discipline.
So stupid, he thought.
There was no longer any point in moving. He should be hungry, but he wasn't. He should also come up with a plan, something smart, but all he could do was shut his eyes and wonder when he would be dead.
It was not a war now.
A war stopped being a war, David decided, when you were shot through the feet.
"Seventy-six hours and counting, all systems go," said the tired announcer in Da Nang. It was late evening, July 17, 1969. Ortiz's transistor radio was still working, even after its passage through the river. "Two days and a wake-up, then we check the place out for little green Communists." The man sighed a heavy, exhausted sigh. "So come on, fellas, let's finish up this two-bit police action. Time to hit the beaches of Tranquillity."
In other news, Rod Carew had stolen home for the seventh time in his career.
Just after dawn, a pair of helicopters swept in low over the Song Tra Ky. Maybe it was David's imagination, maybe the morphine, but for an instant he found himself looking up into the eyes of a young door gunner, rapt, prep-school blue, caught up in the murder of it all. David tried to raise a hand, but the effort made him dizzy. It was all a blur, part of some distant world, and after a few seconds even the blur was gone.
The pain came and went. Sometimes it was nothing. Other times it exceeded physics.
In the heat of midday, David took out another Syrette, punched up, dragged himself down to the river, slipped in, and waited for his feet to quiet down. He tried not to look at the bodies all around him. The smell was enough. He lay on his back in the shallow stream, his shoulders against the bank, and for twenty minutes he let the icy water bubble over his legs and swollen boots. The morphine helped. He was dying, he knew, but his thoughts were baseball thoughts, Marla thoughts, and the sky was a smooth, glossy blue.
He turned on Ortiz's radio, propped it up on the bank, and hummed along to familiar tunes, sliding up and down the scales of his own puny history.
If there was a sad part to this, David observed, it was that his life had gone mostly unlived, all prospect.
Marla, for instance.
Also baseball.
In his junior year at Darton Hall, he'd been scouted by a couple of big-show clubs, the Twins and the Phillies, and with some hard work he might've made it all the way. He had the good glove, the hot bat. For a few minutes, with morphine clarity, David Todd replayed a number of highlights in his head. He was back at shortstop, gunning it to first, and soon afterward he was married to Marla Dempsey, who adored him, and they had a couple of kids and a nice stucco house in Minneapolis, and in his reveries he would not be dead for another fifty years.
In his sophomore year at Darton Hall, David had tried to instruct Marla in some of the finer points of baseball: the intentional walk, the delayed pickoff, the hit-and-run. He had little luck. Marla was an art major. She had trouble caring. "It's what I'm good at," he'd told her. "I can't see why you won't pay attention."
"I do pay attention."
"What's a bunt?"
"A bunt? It's like a dribble, right?"
"Right," he'd said. "Almost."
Sometimes Marla would laugh. Other times she'd mutter a word or two about men and their macho games. "I'll pay attention," she once said, "if you explain how baseball feeds the orphans in India."
"It doesn't," he'd said. "Does art?"
"No. Art feeds something else. Come on now, let's not fight. Tell me about those huge, gorgeous bunts of yours."
And then they'd both laugh. Even so, he could see the dullness in her eyes as he talked about the function of a bunt, how it could be as beautiful and fulfilling as any brushstroke. Marla would listen, and nod, but in the end she would remember nothing.
This frightened him. It made him wonder about their future, what love meant to her, how long it would be before she executed her own hit-and-run.
"The time," said the announcer in Da Nang, "is fifteen hundred hours on the dot, sharp as shitola, and the mercury here in downtown Slope City reads—holy moly, this can't be right—a fuse-poppin' ninety-seven degrees." Then sound effects: the announcer chugging down a glass of water. "What a war—hot as home! So all you boonie rats out there, I want you to gobble down the salt tabs, keep pumpin' in them fluids. That's rock-solid advice from yours truly, Master Sergeant Johnny Ever." The man paused and chuckled. "Which goes double for you dudes up in the mountains, the weak and wounded, poor dumbos like David Todd."
Then came the news. Apollo II was thirty-two hours from touchdown.
In late afternoon David ea
sed off his left boot. Blood trickled from a hole in his instep and from a larger hole just above the toes. He filled his socks with gauze from Doc Paladino's pouch, laced the boot as tight as it would go, took four penicillin tablets, and passed out. He awoke in the deep of night. The pain had moved up through both ankles, into the shin bones, and for a time he listened to himself converse with his feet. He talked baby talk. He made bargains with God.
Later, he tried to sort out the realities.
There were four remaining Syrettes of morphine, which he hoped to conserve for when things got worse. He told himself to wait twenty minutes. He looked at his wristwatch, counting off the seconds, but after one sweep of the hand he shrugged and shot himself up. In the dark, there was the stench of mildew and dead friends. He could smell his feet rotting.
"Here's the straight poop," said the announcer in Da Nang.
"Baseball speaking, you would've made it. Tough rookie year, I'll be honest, but after that ... I don't want to depress you."
"After that what?" said David.
The announcer made a commiserating sound. "Well, hey, we're talking four seasons in the big circus. Nothing spectacular, I'll admit, but what the hell, it ain't Little League."
David was silent. He turned the tuning knob on Ortiz's transistor radio.
There was static, then laughter.
"Nice try, my man. Thing is, nobody dials out Johnny Ever. I'm like—how do I say this?—I'm network. I'm global. I'm Walter Cronkite gone planetary."
"Right," David said.
"As rain, my friend. Exactly as rain. Anyhow, four sweet seasons, it was in the cards. Real unfortunate, you know? Pity, pity, pity." The announcer sighed. "I ain't your daddy, but you should've finished up that senior year, never dropped out. I mean, Christ, you flat-out volunteered for this sorry garbage." He paused to let the reminder take hold. "What the heck. Water over the dam, I reckon. Anything else you need to know?"
"Go away."
"Want to hear about your love life?"
"Just stop."
"Yeah, if only." Briefly, the announcer seemed to ponder the metaphysics of stopping. Then his voice brightened. "Come on, now. Don't be shy. Ask me questions."
At daybreak David swallowed two penicillin tablets, punched in a Syrette, and waited for the inner music. Today he would move downriver. Probably futile, he realized, yet he needed to pretend he was saving himself.
He spent the morning on his belly, sometimes crawling, sometimes hauling himself down the shallows of the river. Mostly dozing. By midday, when he called it quits, he'd moved less than half the distance of a city block. The effort had made him feverish. He'd lost track of his spiritual whereabouts, his time slot, his place in the overall dream of things. Through the fierce afternoon heat David lay in the shade of triple canopy, listening to the river a few meters to his left, then at twilight he sat up and inspected his wounds. The right foot and lower calf had gone yellow-black. The left leg seemed in better shape—more painful, but not nearly so discolored.
He had two more Syrettes. Once these were gone, David knew, he would no longer be wholly human. Even now it was hard to think beyond the next fix. He took out one of the Syrettes and placed it in the grass beside him.
To make himself wait, he switched on Ortiz's radio.
Apollo II was twelve and a half hours from touchdown. "Bad Moon Rising" had hit number two on the Billboard charts.
"And for you die-hard baseball fans," said the announcer, "it's a season for the ages. Dave, my man, can you believe them raggedy-ass Mets? Bunch of has-beens and never-will-bes, they're surprising all of us, even ol' Master Sergeant Johnny Ever. And I'll guarantee you, this here is one very hip, ten-thousand-year lifer who don't get surprised. Spartacus, I guess maybe he surprised me. Esther Williams. That's it, though." The man coughed into his microphone. "So listen, Lieutenant. What's the score out there? Down a few runs? Bottom of the ninth?"
Narcotic babble, David thought. He did not reply.
"I don't mean to make light of it," the announcer said, "but you got to remember, man, this dying crud, it's just one more lopsided game. Everybody wants a miracle—like with them shaggy-ass Mets. Got half a mind to help 'em pull it off." Something coy came into the man's voice. "Maybe you, too."
It was a temptation, but David said nothing.
"Not interested? Can't sell supernatural?"
David stayed silent.
"See, the thing is, I got this special sale on today. Two miracles for the price of one. Ask polite, I'll throw in a virgin."
"Are you God?"
The announcer laughed. "Fuck no, I'm not God. Use your head, man. Does God say 'Fuck no'?" There was a moment of thoughtful silence. "I'm like—how do you say it?—I'm like a middleman. Billy Graham without the sugar, Saint Christopher without the resources. All I can do is put in the request, ask for a chopper, hope for the best."
David closed his eyes, punched in the Syrette, and tried not to cry.
"Not that you'd be missing a whole lot," the announcer said. "Pitiful future, I'm afraid. Face it—who wants a one-legged shortstop? I could run the future tape for you, but I think it might end up real, real depressing. Twenty-two years old, career finished, nobody gives a hoot about war wounds. Your bubble-gum cards, Davy, they won't fetch top dollar. Anyhow, if that's not enough, pretty soon you start dreamin' the bad dreams. Ten, twenty years down the pike, here comes the survivor guilt. Ghosts galore. All these dead guys—Bus Dexter, Vince Mustin—they talk your ear off about what happened here. Wasn't totally your fault—a live-ammo war, for chrissake—but try to tell them that. So one thing leads to another. Did I mention booze? Trouble on the home front. Tough divorce. Hate to say it, but that cute Marla chick, she just wasn't for you. Not for anybody."
David's eyes opened. "What do you mean?"
"Your future, Lieutenant. If you want a future." The announcer made a snorting sound. "Sorry to bear the bad news, but you're in for the standard Jezebel stuff. Old as the crocodiles. Marla tells you how terrific you are, how you're the love of her life, then one day she takes off with this slick stockbroker on a Harley. Before she goes, though, she bawls her eyes out. Says she can't help herself, says she'll love you forever. Big deal, right? Pow, she's gone, and you waste the next six years waiting for the little lady to change her mind. Every day you check your mailbox. Zip. Not a Christmas card. Tell the truth, could you tolerate it? Your own sorry life?" The man paused. Even his silence carried an edge of mockery. "So here's the deal, friend. Food for thought. Hypothetically speaking, let's say I manage to yank you out of this mess. Send in a medevac, scoop you up, get that right leg chopped off in Japan, retool the other one. Then what? You ready for the heartache routine? You really want that? I mean, do you? Managing some sorry Triple-Z outfit in East Paducah? Chaw stains on your molars? Gum cancer? Eating your guts out over a screwed-up ex-wife? Apocalypse, man, it's a sure bet. Boom, down comes Babylon. Ebola. Plague. That's life, Davy. Everybody dies."
"What happened with Marla?" David said.
"So you are paying attention."
"What?"
The announcer sighed in exhaustion. "Sorry, my friend, but I'm not allowed to spill details. Live and learn, that's the theory. Let's just say the gal was born in neutral. No overdrive. No gears at all."
"She never loved me?"
"Your words, not mine. Didn't hear it from Johnny Ever."
Later, after a weather update, the man said, "But Davy, here's the good news. At least she liked you. Liking counts. Liking's right up there with clean socks. Seriously, if more people just flat-out liked each other ... well, you wouldn't be in this miserable fix. Who needs passion? Give me a choice, I'll take plain ol' lukewarm liking. Not everybody's an all-star."
The announcer made a sound of sympathy. He was quiet for a few seconds.
"Give me an opinion," he said. "If I save the day, send in a dust-off, could you live with it? Would you?"
David lay still. "I'd lose a leg?"
"Yeah
, man. Hopalong Cassidy."
"And Marla, too? I'd lose her?"
"The Lone Gimp. Hi-yo, Silver."
David waited a time and then turned off the radio. But there was still an electric hum in the air. Jungle static, jungle gibberish. The announcer yawned and said, "Think it over. No pressure. Either way, pal, nobody'd blame you."
At 0430 hours the next morning, David Todd used his last Syrette. As dawn came, he lay on his back along the Song Tra Ky, not dead, not alive, listening to a delayed broadcast from the moon. "Amazing, isn't it?" said Master Sergeant Johnny Ever. "All that firepower, all that technology. They put them two peckerheads up there, let 'em jump around, but they can't do shit for us lost souls down here on planet Earth. Pathetic, ain't it? Hell, they don't even know you and me exist. Back in the world, Davy, they're all doin' somersaults, uncorkin' the California bubbly. This whole damn war's on hold." He laughed. "A sad state of affairs."
But for David Todd it was not sad. It was sad plus something else.
His feet hurt, he was alone and scared, he was too young for this. But twelve minutes later he felt a bounce of joy as Eagle touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity. It was almost elation, almost awe. He wondered if Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins would make it home.
A year and a half ago Marla had agreed to marry him. Her language, though, had been scrupulous. "I care for you," she'd said, "but I'm not sure it's forever. That seems too much like—"
"Forever?" he'd said.
"I'll try. I will. But I can't promise much."
From the day he'd met her, or even before, David had known that the odds were poison. One in a thousand, maybe worse. But there were no options except to quit.
Now, he smiled at the river and said, "All right."