shrapnel?" No response. "Rafter? You hit?"
     Mr. Payback  grunts. "What's  wrong, New Guy? Did a few rounds make you
nervous?"
     Rafter Man looks up  with a new face. His lips are twisted into a cold,
sardonic smirk.  His labored breathing is  broken by grunts. He  growls. His
lips are  wet with saliva. He's looking at Mr. Payback. The object in Rafter
Man's hand is a  piece  of flesh, Winslow's  flesh, ugly yellow, as big as a
John Wayne cookie, wet with blood. We all look at it for a long time.
     Rafter Man puts the piece of flesh into his mouth, onto his tongue, and
we thing he's going to vomit. Instead, he grits his teeth. Then, closing his
eyes, he swallows.
     I turn off the lights.


     Dawn. The heat of the day  comes quickly, burning  away the mud puddles
left by the monsoon  rain.  Rafter Man and  I ditty-bop down to  the Phu Bai
landing zone. We wait for a med-evac chopper.
     Ten minutes later a Jolly Green Giant comes in loaded.
     Corpsmen  run up  the  ramp at  the  rear of the vibrating machine  and
reappear  immediately,  carrying  canvas  stretchers. On the  stretchers are
bloody rags with men inside. Rafter Man and I  run into the chopper. We lift
a stretcher and run down the metal ramp. The chopper is already beginning to
lift off.
     We place the stretcher on the deck  with the others, where the corpsmen
are  sorting the dead from the  living,  changing bandages, adjusting plasma
bottles.
     Rafter  Man and I run into the  prop wash, running sideways beneath the
thumping  blades into  a tornado of hot wind  and stinging  gravel. We stop,
hunched over, holding up our thumbs.
     The  chopper pilot is an invading Martian  in an orange flame-retardant
flight suit and  an olive-drab  space helmet. The  pilot's  face is a shadow
behind a dark green visor.  He gives  us a thumbs-up.  We run around  to the
cargo ramp and  the door gunner  gives us a hand  up  into  the belly of the
vibrating machine just as it lifts off.
     The  flight  to  Hue  is  north eight  miles. Far below, Viet  Nam is a
patchwork  quilt of greens and yellows. It's a beautiful country, especially
when seen from the air. Viet Nam  is like  a page from a Marco Polo  picture
book. The deck is pockmarked  with shell  holes, and napalm air strikes have
charred vast patches of earth, but the land is healing itself with beauty.
     My  ears  pop.  I  pinch  my  nose and puff  out  my cheeks. Rafter Man
imitates me. We sit on bales of green rubber-impregnated canvas body bags.
     As  we  near Hue, the  door gunner smokes marijuana and fires his  M-60
machine  gun at a farmer in the rice paddies below. The door gunner has long
hair,  a  bushy  moustache,  and is naked except for an unbuttoned  Hawaiian
sport shirt. On the Hawaiian sport shirt are a hundred yellow hula dancers.
     The hamlet beneath us is in free fire zone--anybody can shoot at it  at
any  time and for any reason. We watch the farmer run in the shallow  water.
The farmer knows  only  that his family needs  some rice  to eat. The farmer
knows only that the bullets are tearing him apart.
     He falls, and the door gunner giggles.


     The  med-evac chopper sets down on a landing  zone near Highway One,  a
mile south of  Hue. The LZ  is  cluttered  with walking  wounded,  stretcher
cases, and body bags. Before Rafter Man and I are off the LZ our chopper has
been loaded with wounded and is airborne again, flying back to Phu Bai.
     We wait for a  rough rider convoy in front of a bombed-out gas station.
Hours pass. Noon. I take off my flak jacket. I pull my old, ragged Boy Scout
shirt out of my NVA rucksack. I  put on my  Boy  Scout shirt so that the sun
won't roast  the flesh  from  my  bones. On the  frayed  collar,  corporal's
chevrons that are so salty that  the black enamel has worn off and the brass
shows through. Over the right breast  pocket, a  cloth rectangle which reads
First Marine Division, CORRESPONDENT. And in Vietnamese: BAO CHI.
     Sitting on a bullet-riddled yellow oyster that says SHELL OIL, we drink
Cokes that cost five dollars a bottle. The mamasan who sells us the Cokes is
wearing a conical white hat. She bows every  time we speak. She  squawks and
chatters like an old black bird. She  flashes her black teeth at  us. She is
very  proud of  her teeth. Only a  lifetime of chewing betel  nuts  can make
teeth as black as hers. We  don't understand  a word  of her magpie chatter,
but the  hatred in  the smile  frozen  on her  face says  clearly, "Oh well,
Americans may be assholes but they are very rich."
     There  is  a  popular  sea  story  which  says  that old Victor Charlie
mamasans  sell  Cokes with  ground-up glass in them. Drinking, we  wonder if
that's true.
     Two Dusters, light tanks  with twin 40mm guns, grind by. The men in the
Dusters ignore our thumbs.
     An  hour  later a  Mighty Mite zooms by at eighty  miles  an  hour, the
maximum speed of the little jeep. No luck.
     Then a convoy of six-bys  appears, led by two M-48 Patton tanks. Thirty
big  trucks roar by at full speed. Two more Patton tanks are riding security
at tail-end Charlie.
     The first tank speeds up as it passes us.
     The second tank slows down, bucks, jerks to a halt. In  the turret is a
blond tank commander who is not wearing a helmet or a shirt. He waves us on.
We put  on our  flak jackets. We pick up our gear  and swing it up onto  the
tank. Then Rafter Man and I climb up onto a block of hot, vibrating metal.
     Down in a hatch  by  our  feet is the  driver. His head  protrudes just
enough for him to see; his hands are on  the controls. The driver jerks  the
wobble stick  and  the tank lurches forward,  bouncing, grinding, faster and
faster  and faster. The roar  of an  eight-hundred-horsepower  diesel engine
accelerates to a rhythmic rumble of mechanical power.
     Rafter Man and I fall back against the  hot turret. We are hanging onto
the long  ninety-millimeter gun  like monkeys. The  cool  air  of  speed  is
delicious  after  hours in Viet  Nam's one-hundred-and-twenty- degree yellow
furnace. Our sweat-soaked shirts are cold. Flashing by: Vietnamese hootches,
ponds with  white ducks  in  them, circular  graves  with chipped  and faded
paint, and endless  shimmering pieces of  emerald  water newly  planted with
rice.
     It's  a wonderful day. I'm so happy that I am alive, in one  piece, and
short. I'm in  a world of shit, yes, but  I am alive.  And I am not  afraid.
Riding  the  tank gives me  a  thrilling sense  of power and well-being. Who
dares to shoot at the man who rides the tiger?
     It's a  beautiful  tank.  Painted on  the long  barrel: BLACK  FLAG--We
Exterminate Household Pests. Flying on a radio antenna, a ragged Confederate
flag. Military vehicles are beautiful because they are built from functional
designs which make  them  real, solid, without artifice. The tank  possesses
the beauty  of its hard lines;  it is fifty tons of rolling armor on  tracks
like  steel watchbands. The  tank  is our  protection,  rolling  on  and  on
forever, clanking out the dark mechanical poetry of iron and guns.
     Suddenly the tank shifts to the left. Rafter Man and I  are thrown hard
into the turret. Metal  grinds metal. The tank hits a bump, shifting sharply
to  the right and jerking to a  halt, throwing us forward.  Rafter Man and I
hang onto the gun and say, "Son-of-a-bitch..."
     The blond tank commander climbs out of  the  turret hatch and jumps off
the back of the tank.
     The tank driver has run the tank off the road.
     Fifty  yards  back  a  water  buffalo  is  down on its  back,  legs out
straight. The water bo bellows, tosses its curved horns. On the deck, in the
center of the road, I see a tiny body, facedown.
     Chattering  Vietnamese  civilians  pour  out of  the roadside hootches,
staring and pointing. The Vietnamese civilians crowd around to see how their
American saviors have crushed the guts out of a child.
     The  blond tank commander speaks to the Vietnamese civilians in French.
Then, walking back  to the  tanks, the blond tank commander is pursued by an
ancient papasan. There are tears in the papasan's eyes. The withered old man
shakes his bony little fists and throws Asian curses at the tank commander's
back.  The Vietnamese civilians  grow  silent.  Another child is  dead, and,
although it is very sad and painful, they accept it.
     The blond tank commander climbs up onto his tank and reinserts his legs
into the turret hatch. "Iron Man, you fucking shitbird. You will  drive this
machine  like it's a tank and not a goddamn sports car. You hit  that little
girl, you  blind idiot. Hell, I  could see  her  through  the fucking vision
blocks. She was standing on that water bo's back..."
     The driver turns, his face  hard.  "I didn't see them, skipper. What do
they think  they're doing,  crossing in front of me  like  that? Don't these
zipperheads  know that tanks got the  right-of-way?"  The  driver's face  is
coated with a thin film of oil and sweat; iron has entered into his soul and
he has become a component of the tank, sweating oil to lubricate its meshing
gears.
     The blond  tank commander says, "You fuck up one more  time,  Iron Man,
and you will be a grunt."
     The driver turns back to the front. "Aye-aye, sir. I'll watch the road,
Lieutenant."
     Rafter Man asks, "Sir,  did we kill that  girl?  Why  was  that old man
yelling at you?" Rafter Man looks sick.
     The blond tank commander takes  a green ballpoint pen  and little green
notebook out of his hip  pocket. He writes  something in the  notebook. "The
little girl's grandfather? He was yelling  about how  he needs his water bo.
He wants a condolence award. He wants us to pay him for the water bo."
     Rafter Man doesn't say anything.
     The  blond  tank  commander  yells  at  Iron  Man:  "Drive,  you  blind
son-of-a-bitch."
     And the tank rolls on.


     On the outskirts of Hue, the ancient Imperial Capital, we see the first
sign of the battle--a cathedral, centuries old, now a bullet-peppered box of
ruined stone, roof caved in, walls punctured by shells.
     Entering Hue, the  third largest city in  Viet Nam,  is  a  strange new
experience. Our was has been in  the paddies, in hamlets  where  the largest
structure was a bamboo hut. Seeing the effects of war upon a Vietnamese city
makes me feel like a New Guy.
     The weather is dreary but the city is beautiful. Hue has been beautiful
for so long that not even war and bad weather can make it ugly.
     Empty streets. Every  building  in  Hue has  been hit with some kind of
ordnance. The ground is still wet from last night's rain.  The air is  cool.
The whole city is enveloped in a white mist. The sun is going down.
     We roll past  a  tank which has  been  gutted by B-40  rocket-propelled
grenades. On the barrel of the shattered ninety-millimeter gun: BLACK FLAG.
     Fifty yards down  the road  we pass two wasted  six-bys. One of the big
trucks has been knocked onto its side. The cab of the truck is a broken mass
of  jagged,  twisted steel.  The  second  six-by has  burned  and is only  a
skeleton of black iron. The windshields of both trucks have been strung with
bright necklaces of bullet holes.
     As we roll past Quoc Hoc High School I punch Rafter Man on the arm. "Ho
Chi  Minh went  there,"  I  say.  "I  wonder  if  Uncle  Ho  played  varsity
basketball. I wonder who Uncle Ho took to the senior prom."
     Rafter Man grins.
     Shots pop, far away. Single rounds. Short  bursts of automatic weapons.
The fighting has stopped,  for the moment.  The shots  we hear are just some
grunt trying to get lucky.
     Near the University of Hue the tank grinds to a halt and Rafter Man and
I  hop  off. The University of Hue is now a collection point for refugees on
their way  to  Phu Bai. Whole  families with  all of their  possessions have
occupied the classrooms and  corridors since the battle began. The  refugees
are too tired to run anymore. The refugees look cold and drained the way you
look after death sits on your face and smothers you for so long that you get
tired of screaming. Outside, the women cook pots  of rice. All over the deck
there are piles of human shit.
     We wave good-bye to the blond  tank commander and his tank grumbles and
rolls away. The tank's steel cleats crush some bricks which have been thrown
into the street by explosions.
     Rafter Man and I  stare across the River  of Perfumes. We  stare at the
Citadel.  The  river  is  ugly. The  river  is muddy.  The  steel suspension
bridge--The Bridge of the Golden Waters--is  down, blown by  enemy  frogmen.
Torn  girders  jut out of the  dark water  like the  broken bones  of a  sea
serpent.
     A hand grenade explodes, far away, inside the Citadel.


     Rafter Man and I head  for the MAC-V, Military Assistance Command--Viet
Nam, compound.
     "This is a beautiful place," says Rafter Man.
     "It  was.  It  really  was.  I've  been here  a  few  times  for  award
ceremonies.  General Cushman  was here.  I  took his picture  and he took  a
picture of me taking a picture of him.  And Ky was here, all duded up in his
black silk flight jacket with silver general's stars all over it and a black
cap  with  silver  general's   stars  all  over  that,  too.  Ky  had  these
pearl-handled  pistols  and  wore a purple ascot. He looked like  a Japanese
playboy. He had his program squared away, that Ky. He believed in a Viet Nam
for  the  Vietnamese.  I  guess that's  why  we kicked him out.  But  he was
beautiful  that day.  You  should have  seen all the schoolgirls in their ao
dai, purple and white, carrying their little parasols..."
     "Where are they now? The girls?"
     "Oh,  dead, I guess. Did you  know that there's a legend  that Hue rose
from a pool of mud as a lotus flower?"
     "Look at that!"
     A squad of Arvins are looting a  mansion. The Arvins of the Army of the
Republic of Viet Nam look funny because  all of their  equipment  is too big
for them. In baggy uniforms and oversized helmets they look like little boys
playing war.
     I say,  "Decent.  Number one. We got some slack, Rafter. Remember this,
Rafter Man, any time you can see an Arvin  you are safe from Victor Charlie.
The Arvins run like rabbits at the first sign of violence. An Arvin infantry
platoon  is  about  as  lethal  as  a garden  club  of old  ladies  throwing
marshmallows. Don't believe all that scuttlebutt about Arvins being cowards.
They just hate the Green Machine more than  we do. They  were drafted by the
Saigon government, which  was drafted by the lifers who drafted us, who were
drafted by  the lifers who think that they can  buy the war.  And Arvins are
not stupid.  The  Arvins are not stupid when they are doing  something  they
enjoy,  like stealing.  Arvins sincerely believe that  jewels and  money are
essential military supplies. So we're safe  until the  Arvins start yelling,
'Beaucoup VC, beaucoup VC!'  and then  run away.  But be careful. Arvins are
always  shooting at  chickens, other people's  pigs,  and trees. Arvins will
shoot anything except transistor radios, Coca-Colas, sunglasses,  money, and
the enemy."
     "Don't they get money from their government?"
     I grin. "Money is their government."
     The sun is gone. Rafter Man and I double-time.  A sentry challenges us;
I tell him to go to hell.
     Fifty-six days and a wake-up.


     In the  morning we wake up inside the MAC-V compound, a white two-story
building  with bullet-pocked walls. The compound has  been enclosed behind a
wall of sandbags and concertina wire.
     We gather up our gear and prepare to leave while a light colonel  reads
a statement  made by  the military mayor  of Hue. The statement  is a denial
that  there is  looting in Hue  and a warning that looters will  be shot  on
sight. A dozen  civilian  war  correspondents sit on  the deck, wiping sleep
from  their  eyes,  half-listening, yawning. Then  the light colonel  adds a
personal  comment.  Someone has awarded a Purple Heart to a big  white goose
that  got  wounded while the  compound was  under attack. The light  colonel
feels that the civilian correspondents do not understand that war is serious
business.
     Outside, I point to  a wasted NVA hanging in the wire. "Was  is serious
business, son, and  this is our gross national product." I  kick the corpse,
triggering panic  in  the  maggots  in the  hollow  eye  sockets and in  the
grinning mouth and in each of the bullet holes in his chest. "Gross?"
     Rafter Man kneels down to get a better look. "Yes, he is confirmed."
     A CBS camera crew appears, surrounded by  star-struck grunts who strike
combat-Marine poses, pretending to  be what they are.  They all want  Walter
Cronkite  to  meet  their  sisters.  In white short-sleeved shirts  the  CBS
cameramen hurry off to photograph death in living color.

     I stop a master sergeant. "Top, we want to get into the shit."
     The master  sergeant  is  writing  on  a  piece  of yellow  paper  on a
clipboard.  He  doesn't  look  up, but  jerks  his thumb  over his shoulder.
"Across the river. One-Five. Get a boat ride by the bridge."
     "One-Five? Outstanding. Thanks, Top."
     The master sergeant walks away, writing on the yellow paper. He ignores
four skuzzy grunts who run into the compound, each man holding up one corner
of a poncho. On the  poncho is a dead Marine. The grunts are screaming for a
corpsman and  when  they  put the poncho  down,  very gently, a pool of dark
blood pours out onto the concrete deck.
     Rafter Man  and I hurry  down to the  River of Perfumes.  We talk to  a
baby-faced  Navy  ensign who  souvenirs  us a ride  on a  Vietnamese gunboat
ferrying reinforcements to the Vietnamese Marines.
     As we skim down the river Rafter Man asks, "Are these guys any good?"
     I nod. "The best the  Arvins  got.  They're  not as tough as the Korean
Marines, though. The ROK's are so hard that they got muscles in  their shit.
The Blue Dragon Brigade. I was on an op with them down by Hoi An."
     A shot pops from the shore. The bullet buzzes over.
     The  gunboat crew opens up with a fifty-caliber machine gun and a forty
mike-mike cannon.
     Rafter Man watches with joy  in his eyes as the bullets  knock  up thin
stalks of water along the river bank. He holds his piece at port arms, first
to fight.


     The Strawberry Patch, a large triangle of land between  the Citadel and
the River of Perfumes, is a quiet suburb  of  Hue. We get off the gunboat at
the Strawberry  Patch and wander around with the Vietnamese Marines until we
see a little Marine with an expensive pump shotgun slung  across his back, a
case of C rations on his shoulder, and DEADLY DELTA on his flak jacket.
     I say, "Hey, bro, where's One-Five?"
     The little Marines turns, smiles.
     I say, "You need a huss with that?"
     "No thanks, Marine. You people One-One?"
     "No, sir,"  I say. Officers do not wear rank insignia in the field  but
snuffies learn  to fix  a  man's rank  by  his  voice.  "We're  looking  for
One-Five. I got a bro in the First Platoon. They call him Cowboy. He wears a
cowboy hat."
     "I'm  Cowboy's platoon  commander. The  Lusthog Squad is in the platoon
area up by the Citadel."
     We walk along with the little Marine.
     "I'm Joker,  sir. Corporal Joker. This is Rafter Man. We work for Stars
and Stripes."
     "My  name  is  Bayer.  Robert  M.  Bayer the third.  My  people call me
Shortround, for obvious reasons. You here to make Cowboy famous?"
     I laugh. "Never happen."


     The  gray sky is clearing.  The white mist is moving away, exposing Hue
to the sun.
     First Platoon's area  is  within sight  of  the  massive  walls  of the
Citadel. While First Platoon  waits  for  the  attack to  begin, the Lusthog
Squad is partying.
     Crazy Earl points a  forefinger at  the three  of us. "Resupply! Number
one!" Then: "Hey, cowpuncher, the Joker is on deck."
     Cowboy looks up and grins. He's holding a large  brown  bottle of tiger
piss--Vietnamese  beer. "Well, no shit. It's the Joker and  his New Guy. Lai
dai, bros, come on, sit and share, sit and share."
     Rafter Man and I sit down in the dirt and Cowboy throws loose stacks of
Vietnamese  piasters into  our  laps.  I  laugh,  surprised.  I pick up  the
brightly colored  bills, large bills, in large denominations. Cowboy  shoves
bottles of tiger piss into our hands.
     "Hey,  Skipper!"  says Cowboy. "Souvenir  me  spaghetti  and meatballs,
okay? Every  time  we  chow down  I pull ham and  mothers--the  Breakfast of
Champions. I hate fucking ham and lima beans."
     The little Marine rips open one case of C's, pulls out a cardboard box,
pitches it to Cowboy.
     Cowboy  catches the  box,  squints at the  label.  "Number one. Thanks,
Skipper."
     Crazy Earl throws another stack of piasters into my lap.
     Every man in the squad has a pile of money.
     "Man,  we  finally  got  paid," says  Crazy  Earl. "You know  what I am
saying, gentlemen? We been slave-labor mercenaries and  now  we are rich. We
got a million P's here, gentlemen. Yes, that's beaucoup P's."
     I say, "Sir, where'd this money--"
     Mr. Shortround shrugs. "Money? I don't see any money." He takes off his
helmet. On the back of the helmet: Kill a Commie for Christ. Mr.  Shortround
lights a cigarette. "About half a million  P's. Maybe a thousand dollars per
man in American money."
     Cowboy says, "You got to write about our John Wayne lieutenant." Cowboy
punches Mr.  Shortround on the arm. "Mr. Shortround is a mustang.  When  the
Crotch made him a lieutenant he was just a corporal,  just a snuffy like us.
He's very little, but he is oh so bad." Cowboy tilts his head back and sucks
in  a long swallow  of  tiger  piss.  Then: "We  were  taking  this railroad
terminal. That's where the  safe was. We blew  it open with  a block of C-4.
The gooks  were coming  down on us  with automatic  weapons, B-40's,  even a
fucking mortar.  The  Lieutenant got  six  confirmed.  Six! He  wasted those
zipperheads like a born killer."
     "There are NVA here," says Crazy Earl. "Many, many of them."
     "That's affirmative," says Cowboy. "And they are as hard  as slant-eyed
drill instructors. They are highly motivated individuals."
     Crazy Earl holds his bottle by the  neck and smashes it across a fallen
statue of a fat, smiling, bald-headed gook. "This ain't a war, it's a series
of overlapping riots. We blow them away. They come up behind us before we're
out of sight and shoot us  in the ass. I  know a guy in  One-One that shot a
gook  and  then  tied a  satchel  charge to  him  and  blew him into  little
invisible  pieces because shooting  gooks is a waste of time--they come back
to  life.  But  these  gooks  piss you  off  so bad that  you  get to  shoot
something, anything. Bros,  half the confirmed kills I got are civilians and
the other half is water buffaloes." Earl pauses, burps, drawing the burp out
as long as he can. "You should have seen Animal Mother wasting those Arvins.
As soon as we hit the shit the Arvins started di-di mau-ing for the rear and
Animal Mother spit and then blew them away."
     "I miss Stumbling Stewey," says Alice, the black giant.  He explains to
me  and  Rafter  Man: "Stumbling  Stewey was our  honcho  before Stoke,  the
Supergrunt.  Stumbling  Stewey was real nervous, you  know? Very nervous.  I
mean,  he was nervous. The  only way the dude  could relax was throwing hand
grenades. He  was always popping frags all over the area.  Then  he  started
holding on  to them  right up to the  last second.  So one day ol' Stumbling
Stewey pulled the  pin and just  stood  there,  staring,  just  staring  and
staring at that little ol' olive-drab egg in his hand..."
     Crazy Earl nods, burps.  "I was just a New Guy the day Stumbling Stewey
blew  himself away and Stoke the Supergrunt  took the  squad.  Stoke made me
assistant squad leader. He could  see that I  didn't  know nothing,  and all
that good  shit,  but he said he liked  my personality." Crazy Earl  takes a
swallow from another bottle of beer. "Hey, Cowboy, get your horse! Quick! My
crabs are having a rodeo!"
     Donlon, the radioman, says, "I hope we stay  here. This street fighting
is decent duty. We can  see  them here. We got cover,  resupply,  even  some
areas  where you  can cut a few Z's without  digging a hole. No rice paddies
full of slope shit to swim in. No immersion foot. No jungle rot. No  leeches
falling from the trees."
     Crazy Earl flips a beer bottle into the air and the  bottle arches down
and smashes upon a  broken  wall. "Affirmative,  but  we  blow  up all these
shrines and temples and the gooks got lots of shit to hide under and we have
to dig them out."
     Everybody gets a little high. Crazy Earl goes into a long, detailed sea
story about how the Montagnard Tribesmen are  in fact Viet Cong cavemen. "We
said we were going to bomb them back to the Stone Age and we do not lie."
     Cowboy  suggests that Montagnards are  actually  Viet  Cong Indians and
that the secret  to winning  the war is  to issue  each grunt  a horse. Then
Victor Charlie would have to hump while Marines could ride.
     Crazy  Earl puts his arm across the shoulders of the  man next to  him.
The man has a bush  cover pulled down over his face, a  beer in  his hand, a
pile of money in his lap.  "This is my  bro," says  Crazy Earl, removing the
bush  cover from  the  man's  face. "This is  his party. He is the  guest of
honor. You see, today is his birthday."
     Rafter Man looks at me, his mouth open. "Sarge..."
     I say, "Don't call me Sarge."
     The man next to Crazy Earl  is a dead man, a North Vietnamese corporal,
a clean-cut Asian kid about seventeen years old with ink-black hair, cropped
short.
     Crazy Earl hugs  the North Vietnamese  corporal. He grins. "I made  him
sleep." Crazy Earl puts his forefinger to his lips and whispers, "Shhh. He's
resting now."
     Before Rafter Man  can start asking questions Animal Mother and another
Marine double-time up the road, carrying a large cardboard box between them.
They drop the box and reach  inside. They throw plastic bags  to each of us.
"Resupply! Resupply! Get your red-hot bennies. Scarf it up!"
     Cowboy snatches up his bag and rips it open. "Long-rats. Outstanding!"
     I pick up my bag and I show it to Rafter Man. "This is number one chow,
Rafter. The Army eats this shit on humps. Add water and you got real food."
     Lieutenant Shortround says,  "Okay, Mother, where'd  you  souvenir  the
chow?"
     Animal Mother spits. He grins, baring rotten teeth. "I stole it."
     "You stole it, sir."
     "Yeah, I stole it...sir."
     "That's looting. They shoot people for that."
     "I stole it from the Army...sir."
     "Outstanding. It is part of your duty as a  Marine to harass our sister
services. Carry on."
     Cowboy punches the Marine who helped Animal Mother carry  the cardboard
box. "This is T.H.E.  Rock. Make him  famous. He wears that  rock around his
neck so that when the dinks zap him they'll know who he is."
     T.H.E. Rock grins. "You fucking  alcoholic. I wish  you'd  stop telling
people about my rock." He pulls out a rawhide cord and shows  us his rock, a
quartz crystal mounted in brass.
     Animal Mother props his M-60  machine gun against a wall and sits down,
cross-legged. "Man, I almost got me some eatin' pussy."
     T.H.E. Rock says, "That's affirmative. Mother was chasing a little gook
girl with his dick hanging out...."
     Lieutenant Shortround pulls his  K-bar from its sheath and cuts a chunk
from a block of C-4 plastic explosive he has extracted from a Claymore mine.
He puts the  piece  of C-4 into  a little stove he has made  by punching air
holes into an empty C rations can. He strikes a match and lights the C-4. He
fills a second  can with  water from his canteen  and then holds the can  of
water over the blue flame. "Mother, you know what I told you last week."
     A Phantom  F-4 jet roars over  and  unloads a few  rocket pods into the
Citadel. Explosions rock the deck.
     T.H.E. Rock  looks at  Animal Mother  as he  explains: "She  was just a
baby, sir. Thirteen or fourteen."
     Animal  Mother grins, spits.  "If she's old  enough to bleed, she's old
enough to butcher."
     Mr. Shortround  looks at  Animal Mother,  but doesn't say  anything. He
takes a white plastic spoon out of his shirt pocket and puts it into the can
of boiling water. Then he takes a tinfoil packet  of cocoa  out of his thigh
pocket, tears it open, pours the brown powder into the can of boiling water.
He  takes hold  of  the  white  plastic  spoon  and  begins to stir the  hot
chocolate slowly. "Animal Mother? Do you hear me? I'm talking to you."
     Animal Mother glares at the lieutenant. Then,  "Oh, I was just  fooling
around, Lieutenant."
     Mr. Shortround stirs his hot chocolate.
     I say, "Animal Mother, how come you think you're so bad?"
     Animal Mother looks  at me, surprised.  "Hey, motherfucker,  don't even
talk to me. You ain't a  grunt. You want your face stomped in? Huh? You want
to battle?"
     I pick up my M-16.
     Animal Mother reaches for his M-60.
     Cowboy says, "Man, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's violence. I
mean, if  you  got  to blow Mother away,  that's  outstanding.  Nobody likes
Mother anyway. Shit, he don't even like  himself. But  you got to get a real
gun, not that  toy  M-16. If it's Mattel, it's swell." Cowboy unhooks a frag
from his flak jacket and tosses it to me. "Here. Use this."
     I catch  the  hand  grenade.  I  toss  it  up into the air a few times,
catching  it,  still looking  at Animal Mother. "No,  I'm going to get me an
M-60 and then me and this motherfucker are going to have one duel--"
     "Stow it, Joker," Mr. Shortround interrupts: "Animal Mother, listen up.
You harass one more little girl and I'm going to put my little silver bar in
my pocket and then you and I are going to throw some hands."
     Animal Mother grunts, spits, picks up a bottle of  tiger piss. He hooks
a tooth  into the  metal cap and  forces the bottle up. The cap pops off. He
takes a swallow, then looks at  me. He mutter,  "Fucking  poge..." He  takes
another  couple of swallows  and then  says very loud, "Cowboy, you remember
when we was set up in that L-shaped ambush up by Khe Sanh and blew away that
NVA rifle squad? You remember that little gook bitch that was  guiding them?
She was a lot younger  than the  one I saw today." He takes another swallow.
"I didn't get to fuck that one either. But that's okay.  That's okay. I shot
her motherfucking face off." Animal Mother burps. He looks at me and smirks.
"That's affirmative, poge. I shot her motherfucking face off."
     Alice shows me a necklace of little bones and tries to convince me that
they're magic Voodoo  bones  from New Orleans,  but  they look like dry  old
chicken bones to me.
     "We...are animals," I say.
     After a couple  of  minutes Crazy Earl  says, "Grunts ain't animals. We
just  do our job. We're shot at and  missed, shit on and hit.  The gooks are
grunts,  like us. They fight, like  us.  They got  lifer poges running their
country and we  got lifer  poges running ours.  But at least  the  gooks are
grunts, like  us. Not the  Viet Cong. The VC  are some dried-up old mamasans
with rusty  carbines. The NVA, man,  we are tight with the NVA. We kill each
other, no doubt about it, but we're tight. We're hard." Crazy Earl tosses an
empty beer bottle to the deck and picks up his Red Ryder air rifle. He fires
the air rifle at the bottle and the BB ricochets off the bottle with a faint
ping.  "I love  the  little  commie  bastards,  man.  I  really  do.  Grunts
understand grunts. These are great  days  we are living, bros. We  are jolly
green giants,  walking with the earth  with guns.  The people we wasted here
today are the finest individuals we will ever  know. When  we rotate back to
the World we're  gonna miss  having somebody  around who's  worth  shooting.
There ought to be a  government for grunts. Grunts could fix the world up. I
never met a grunt I didn't like, except Mother."
     I say, "Never happen. It would make too much sense. It's better that we
save Viet Nam from the people who live here. Of course, they love us;  we'll
kill them if they don't. When you've got them by  the balls their hearts and
minds will follow."
     Donlon says,  "Well, we're  rich and we  got beaucoup beer and beaucoup
chow. Now all we need is the Bob Hope show."
     I  stand  up.  The beer has  gone  to my  head.  "I'll be Bob Hope."  I
hesitate.  I touch my  face.  "Oh, wow,  my  nose ain't  big  enough."  Mild
laughter.
     A hundred yards  away a heavy machine gun fires a long burst. Scattered
small arms fire replies.
     I do impressions.
     "Friends, I am Bob Hope. You all  remember me, I'm sure.  I was in some
movies with Bing Crosby. Well, I'm here in  Viet Nam to  entertain  you. The
folks back home  don't care enough about you to  bring you back to the World
so you won't get wasted, but they do care enough to send comedians over here
so that at least you can  die laughing. So have you  heard the one about the
Viet Nam veteran who came home and said, 'Look, Mom, no hands!'"
     The squad laughs. They say: "Do John Wayne!"
     Doing my John Wayne voice, I tell  the squad a joke: "Stop me if you're
heard this.  There was  a Marine of nuts  and bolts,  half robot--weird  but
true--whose  every move  was cut from pain as though from  stone. His stoney
little hide had been crushed and broken. But he just laughed and said, 'I've
been crushed  and  broken before.' And sure enough, he  had  the  heart of a
bear. His heart functioned for weeks after it had been diagnosed by doctors.
His  heart  weighed half  a pound. His heart  pumped  seven hundred thousand
gallons  of  warm blood through one hundred thousand miles of veins, working
hard--hard enough in twelve hours to lift one sixty-five ton boxcar one foot
off the  deck.  He said. The  world would not  waste the heart of a bear, he
said. On his clean blue pajamas many  medals hung.  He was a walking word of
history, in the shop for a few repairs. He took it on the chin and was good.
One  night in Japan his life  came out  of his body--black--like  a question
mark. If you can keep your head  while others are losing  theirs perhaps you
have misjudged the situation. Stop me if you've heard this..."
     Nobody says anything.
     "The war is ruining my sense of humor," I say. I squat.
     Cowboy nods. "There  it is. All  I'm  doing  is counting my days,  just
counting  my  days. A  hundred days  and a wake-up and I'll  be on that  big
silver Freedom Bird, flying back to  the World, back to the  block,  back to
the  Lone Star State, back to  the land of the big  PX. And I'll have medals
all over myself.  And I won't be fucked up. No, when you  get fucked up they
send you to Japan. You go to Japan and somebody pins a medical discharged to
what's left of you and all that good shit."
     "I'd rather be  wasted," I say.  "Hire the handicapped--they're  fun to
watch."
     Cowboy grins.
     T.H.E. Rocks  says, "You know, my mom writes  me a lot of letters about
what a brave boy  T.H.E. Rock is. T.H.E.  Rock is not a boy; he's a person."
He drinks beer.  "I  know I'm a person  because I  know there ain't no Santa
Claus. There ain't  no  fucking Easter bunny. You know? Back in the World we
thought that the future is always safe in a little gold box somewhere. Well,
I'll live forever. I'm T.H.E. Rock."
     Crazy  Earl grunts. "Hey Skipper, what say we stuff some dope into your
shotgun and toke it through the barrel?"
     Mr. Shortround  shakes his  head. "No can do, Craze. We're moving  most
skosh."
     Donlon is talking into his handset. "Sir, the C.O. wants the Actual."
     Donlon gives the  handset to  Mr.  Shortround.  The Lieutenant talks to
Delta Six, the commanding officer of Delta One-Five.
     "Number ten. Just  when we were scarfing  up some of the bennies," says
Crazy Earl. "Just when we were getting a little piece of slack..."
     Lieutenant  Shortround  stands  up  and starts  putting  on  his  gear.
"Moving, rich kids. Saddle up. Craze, get your people on their feet."
     "Moving. Moving."
     We all stand up, except for the NVA corporal who remains seated, a beer
in  his  hand, a pile  of money in  his lap, his split lips curled back in a
death grin.
     Alice steps  up with a machete in  one hand and  a blue canvas shopping
bag in the other. He kneels. With two blows of  the machete  Alice chops off
the NVA  corporal's feet. He picks up each foot by the big  toe and drops it
into the blue shopping bag. "This gook was a very hard dude. Number one! Big
Magic!"
     The  grunts  stuff  beer  bottles,  piasters,   long-rats,  and  looted
souvenirs into their baggy  pockets, into Marine-issue field packs, and into
NVA haversacks  souvenired  from  enemy grunts they  have wasted. The grunts
pick up their weapons.
     Moving. Moving. I walk behind Cowboy. Rafter Man walks behind me.
     I say, "Well, I guess this Citadel shit is going to  be oh  so bad. But
it could be worse. I mean, at least it's not Parris Island."
     Cowboy grins. He says, "There it is."


     We see the great walls  of the Citadel. With zigzagging ramparts thirty
feet high and  eight feet  thick,  surrounded by a moat,  the fortress looks
like an ancient castle  from a fairy tale about  dragons  who guard treasure
and knights on white horses and princesses in need of assistance. The castle
is black stone against a  cold  gray sky,  with  dark  towers  populated  by
shadows that are alive.
     The Citadel  is actually  a  small  walled  city constructed  by French
engineers as protection  for the home of Gia Long,  Emperor  of the Annamese
Empire. When Hue was the Imperial Capital, the Citadel protected the Emperor
and  the royal family  and the  ancient  treasure of the Forbidden City from
pirates raiding from the South China Sea.
     We are big white American boys in steel helmets and heavy flak jackets,
armed with magic weapons, laying siege to a castle in modern times. One-Five
has changed a lot since the days when it was  the first battalion to hit the
beach at Guadacanal.
     Metal  birds  flash  in and  shit  steel eggs  all over the place.  F-4
Phantom  jet  fighters  are  dropping  napalm, high  explosives,  and  Willy
Peter--white  phosphorus. With  bombs  we are expressing ourselves;  we  are
writing our history in shattered blocks of stone.
     Black roses of smoke bloom inside the Citadel.
     We ditty-bop  Indian-file  along both  sides of the road,  twenty yards
between each man. The lines pop and snick as cocking levers are snapped back
and bolts sent home,  chambering rounds. Safeties are  clicked off. Selector
switches are thumbed to the full  automatic  position. Those  Marines  armed
with M-14's fix bayonets.
     Machine guns  start typing  out history. First  our guns,  then theirs.
Snipers on the wall fire a round here and there, sighting us in.
     War is a catalogue of sounds. Our ears direct our feet.
     A bullet crunches into a wall.
     Somebody starts singing:

        M.I.C...K.E.Y...M.O.U.S.E.

     The  machine guns  are exchanging a steady fire now,  like  old friends
having a conversation. Thumps and thuds puncture the rhythm of the bullets.
     The snipers zero in on  us.  Each shot becomes a  word spoken by death.
Death is talking to us. Death wants to tell  us a funny secret.  We may  not
like death but death likes  us. Victor  Charlie  is hard but  he never lies.
Guns tell the truth. Guns never say, "I'm only kidding." War is ugly because
the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.
     I say out loud: "You and me, God--right?"
     I  send  guard-mail  directives  to   my  personal  Tactical   Area  of
Responsibility,  which extends  to the perimeters  of  my skin.  Dear  Feet,
tiptoe through the  tulips. Balls,  hang in there. Legs,  don't do any  John
Waynes.  My body  is  serviceable.  I  intend  to maintain  my body  in  the
excellent condition in which it was issued.
     In the  silence of our hearts we  speak  to  our werewolf weapons;  our
weapons reply.
     Cowboy is  listening to me  mutter to myself. "John Wayne? Hey, Joker's
right.  This ain't  real. This is just a John Wayne movie. Joker can be Paul
Newman. I'll be a horse."
     "Yeah."
     "Crazy Earl says, "Can I be Gabby Hayes?"
     "The Rock can be a rock," says Donlon, the radioman.
     Alice says, "I'll be Ann-Margret."
     "Animal  Mother can be  a rabid buffalo," says Stutten,  honcho  of the
third fire team.
     The walls are assaulted by werewolf laughter.
     "Who'll be the Indians?"
     The  little enemy folks  audition for the part--machine-gun bullets rip
across a wall to starboard.
     Lieutenant Shortround calls up his squad leaders with a hand signal--he
holds up his right hand and twirls it. Three  squad leaders, including Crazy
Earl, double-time to him.  He  talks to them,  points at the wall. The squad
leaders double-time back  to  their squads  to  confer with their  fire team
leaders.
     Lieutenant Shortround blows a whistle  and then  we're all running like
big-assed birds. We don't want to to  this.  We are  all afraid. But  if you
stayed behind you would be alone. Your friends are going; you go too. You're
not a person anymore. You don't have to be who you are  anymore. You're part
of an attack, one  green object in a line of green objects, running toward a
breach in the  Citadel wall, running through hard noise  and bursting metal,
running, running, running...you don't look back.
     We  double-time,  werewolves  with  guns,  panting.  We  run  as though
impatient to  sink  into  the  darkness that is opening up  to  swallow  us.
Something snaps and we're  past the  point of no return. We're going through
the broken wall. We're running fast and we aren't going to stop. Nothing can
stop us.
     The air is being torn.
     The deck  shifts beneath your feet. The asphalt sucks at your feet like
sand on the beach.
     Green tracer bullets dissect the sky.
     Bullets  hit the street. The  impact  of the bullets is  the sound of a
covey of quail taking flight.  And sparks.  You  feel the  shock  of bullets
punching through bricks. Splinters of stone sting your face.
     People tell you what to do.
     Keep moving, keep moving,  keep moving.  If  you  stop  moving,  if you
hesitate, your heart will stop beating. Your legs  are machines  winding you
up like a mechanical toy.  If your legs  stop  moving, your taut spring will
run down and you will fall over, a lump without motion.
     You  feel like  you could  run around the world. Now the asphalt  is  a
trampoline and you are fast and graceful, a green jungle cat.
     Sounds.  Cardboard  being torn. Head-on collisions.  Trains  derailing.
Walls falling into the sea.
     Metal hornets swarm overhead.
     Pictures: The dark eyes of guns; the cold  eyes of guns. Pictures blink
and blur, a wall, tiny men, shattered blocks of stone.
     Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving...
     Your    feet   take    you   up...up...over   the    rubble   of    the
wall...up...up...you're loving  it...climbing,  you're not  human, you're an
animal, you feel like a god...you scream: "DIE! DIE! DIE, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!
DIE! DIE! DIE!"
     Hornets try to swarm into you--you swat them aside.
     Boots crunch in powdered stone. Equipment flaps, clangs,  and  rattles.
People curse.
     "Oh, fuck."
     Keep moving.
     Your Boy Scout shit is  wet with sweat. Salty  sweat wiggles into  your
eyes and onto your lips. Your  right index finger is on the  trigger of your
M-16. Here I  come, you  say  to  yourself, here  I come with a  gun full of
bullets. How  many rounds left in this magazine? How many days  left  to  my
rotation  date? Am I carrying too  much gear? Where are  they? And where the
hell are my feet?
     A  face.  The face moves.  Your weapon sights in. Your  M-16  automatic
rifle vibrates. The face is gone.
     Keep moving.
     And then  you feet no longer touch the  ground,  and you wonder  what's
happening to you. Your body relaxes, then goes  rigid. You hear the sound of
a human body erupting, the  ugly sound  of a human  body being torn apart by
high-speed metal. The pictures blinking  before  your eyes slow  down like a
silent film  on a defective reel.  Your weapon floats our of your hands  and
suddenly you are alone. You are floating. Up. Up. You are being lifted up by
a  wall of  sound. The  pictures blink  faster  and  faster and suddenly the
filmstrip snaps and the wall of sound slams into you--total, terrible sound.
The deck is enormous as you fall. You merge with the earth. Your flak jacket
absorbs much of  the impact. Your helmet  falls off  your  head  and  spins.
You're on your back, crushed by sound. You think: Is that the sky?
     "CORPSMAN," someone says, far away. "CORPSMAN!"


     You're  on  your  back. All  around  you boots dance by,  pounding  and
crunching.  Dirt  clods and  pieces  of stone fall  from the sky, into  your
mouth, your eyes. You spit out stone. You hold up one of your hands. You try
to tell the pounding boots: Hey, don't step one me.
     Your  palms are hot. Your  legs are  broken. With one of your hands you
touch yourself, your  face,  your thighs,  you  search your broken  guts for
warm, wet cavities.
     Your  reaction  to  your  own  death  is  nothing  more  than a  highly
intensified curiosity.
     A  hand  presses you down. You wonder if you should try to do something
about your broken legs. You think that it's possible that you don't have any
legs. Tons of  ocean water, dark and cold  and  populated by  monsters,  are
crushing you.  You try to  raise your head. Hands hold  you down. You fight.
You fling your arms. Strong hands search for damage in your body.
     "Legs..."
     You cough up spiders.
     On  the  ground beside you is  a  Marine  without a  head.  Exhibit  A,
formerly a  person, now two  hundred  pounds  of fractured  meat. The Marine
without a head is on his back. His face has been knocked off. The top of his
skull has been torn back, with the soft brain inside. The jawbone and bottom
teeth  are  intact.  In the  hands of  the Marine  without a head is an M-60
machine  gun,  locked  there forever  by rigor mortis. His  finger in on the
trigger. His canvas jungle boots are muddy.
     You look at the dried mud on the jungle boots of  the  Marine without a
head and you are stunned that his feet look so much like your own.
     You reach out. You touch his hand.
     Something stings your arm.
     Suddenly, you are very tired. You  are breathing hard from the running.
Your heart is beating so hard that  it  seems to want to tear its way out of
your body. Through the  center of your heart there  is a  star-shaped bullet
hole.
     Hands touch you. Gentle hands. "You're okay, jarhead. No sweat. I'm Doc
Jay. Can you hear me? You can trust me, Marine. I got magic hands."
     "No," you  say. "NO!"  You try to explain to the hands that part of you
is missing in action. You want the hands to find the missing part; you don't
want your missing  part to be left behind. But you cannot  speak. Your mouth
won't work.
     You sleep. You trust the hands that are holding you, the hands that are
lifting you up.


     In your dope dream  of  death you are an enlistment  poster nailed to a
black wall: THE MARINE CORPS BUILDS MEN--BODY--MIND--SPIRIT.
     You feel  yourself  breaking  up into three pieces...you  hear  strange
voices...
     "What's  wrong?" one  voice  says,  confused  and  frightened.  "What's
wrong?"
     "Who's there?"
     "What?"
     "Who's there?"
     "I'm Mind. Are you--"
     "Affirmative. I'm his Body. I'm not feeling well..."
     "This is utterly ridiculous," interjects a  third voice. "This can't be
happening."
     "Who said that?" Mind demands. "Body? That you?"
     "I said it, fool. You may call me Spirit."
     Body sneers. "I don't believe either of you."
     Mind speaks slowly: "Now, we've got to  be logical about  this. Our man
is down. We've got to get organized."
     Body whimpers. "Listen, you guys, that's  me lying there--not  you. You
don't know what it's like."
     Mind says, "Look, you moron, we're all in this together. If he goes, we
all go."
     "Is he..." Body can't say the word. "I've got to survive."
     "No," Mind  observes. "Not  necessarily. They  play this game.  I'm not
sure we are allowed to interfere."
     Body is horrified. "What kind of 'game'?"
     "I'm not sure. Something about rules. They have a lot of rules."
     Spirit says, "This guy pisses me off. I'm not going back."
     Mind says, "You have to go back."
     "On the  contrary,"  says Spirit. "I do as  I please.  You two  have no
control over me."
     "Forget him," says Body.
     Mind insists, "But Spirit must return with us."
     "No. We don't need him."
     Mind considers  the  situation.  "Perhaps  Spirit has a valid argument.
Perhaps I shouldn't go back either..."
     Body is frantic. "NO! PLEASE...."
     "Yet,  actually,  nothing  would be  achieved by  not going  back.  Our
actions will not affect their game in any event. Losing one man won't change
the game one way  or the other.  In fact, losing men  seems to be the  whole
point  of  the  game. We must be practical.  Come  along,  Body, we're going
back."
     Spirit says, "Tell the man I'm missing in action."


     In your dream you call for Chaplain Charlie. You  met the Navy chaplain
when  you  interviewed him for a  feature article you were writing. Chaplain
Charlie  was  an   amateur  magician.  With  his  magic,   Chaplain  Charlie
entertained Marines  in sick  bays and distributed spiritual tourniquets  to
men who  were still  alive,  but  weaponless.  To brutal,  godless  children
Chaplain Charlie spoke about how God is merciful, despite appearances, about
how  the  Ten Commandments lack detail because when you're writing on  stone
tablets with lightning bolts  you're got to be brief,  about  how  the  Free
World  will conquer Communism  with aid of God and  a few Marines, and about
free fish. One day a Vietnamese child booby-trapped Chaplain Charlie's black
bag  of tricks. Chaplain Charlie reached in and pulled out a  bright ball of
death...

     "Hey, hit the deck, leatherneck, we're moving."
     "What--?" I recognize the  rooms I'm  in.  I remember the  room from an
earlier visit to  Hue.  I'm in  the Palace of Perfect Peace in the Forbidden
City.
     Cowboy punches my  arm. "Okay, Joker,  stop  acting. We know you're not
dead."
     I sit up. I'm on a canvas med-evac  stretcher. "There it is. I  did it!
Number one! I got my first heart."
     Rafter Man says, "A Purple Heart?"
     Cowboy laughs. "Tough titty, you poge. No heart."
     I pat myself with my hands. "The hell you say. Where am I hit?"
     Rafter Man says, "You been out for hours. Doc Jay said you got blown up
by a B-40. A rocket-propelled grenade. But you only got the concussion. Some
other guy got the shrapnel."
     "Well," I say, "that sounds like a lifer-type thing to do."
     Animal Mother grunts and spits.  Animal  Mother spits a  lot because he
thinks it  makes him look tough. "Lifers never  get  wasted. Just the ones I
frag, that's all."
     Donlon takes a step toward Animal Mother. Donlon  is glaring  at Animal
Mother. Donlon starts to say something, then decides against it.

     Rafter Man says, "Doc Jay  gave  you  some morphine. You were trying to
punch him out."
     "There it is," I say. "I'm mean, even when  I'm unconscious. But that's
some very good shit, that morphine."
     Cowboy pushes his gray Marine-issue glasses  up on  his nose. "I  could
use a hit of something myself. I wish we had time to smoke some grass."
     I say, "Hey, bro, who's on your program?"
     Cowboy shakes  his head.  "Mr. Shortround is  KIA." Cowboy pulls  a red
bandana from his back pocket and wipes his grimy face. "The platoon radioman
was down. Some redneck from Alabama. I forget his name. Took a sniper  round
through  the knee.  The Skipper went out to get him. A  frag got him. A frag
got them  both. At least..."  Cowboy  turns to look  at  Animal Mother.  "At
least, that's how Mother tells it, and he was walking point."
     I  shake the  cobwebs out  of my head and pick up my  gear. "Where's my
Mattel?"
     Cowboy  hands me a grease gun. "Your Mattel got  wasted. Use this."  He
hands me a canvas bag containing half-a-dozen grease-gun magazines.
     I check out the grease gun. "This thing is obsolete."
     Cowboy shrugs. "I souvenired it off  a wasted tanker." Cowboy scratches
his face. "I got a new K-bar. And I souvenired Mr. Shortround's pistol."
     "Where's Craze?"
     Cowboy  leads me  outside a long row of body  bags and  ponchos stuffed
with human junk.
     We stand over Craze as Cowboy says, "Craze did a John Wayne. He finally
went berserk. Shot BB's at a gook machine gun. The BB's bounced off the gook
gunners. You should  have  seen it. Craze was laughing like a  happy  little
kid. Then that slope machine gun blew him away."
     I nod. "Anybody else?"
     Cowboy checks  his weapon,  snaps  the bolt to  see  that  it's working
smoothly. "T.H.E. Rock. A sniper. Popped his head off. I'll have to tell you
about  it. Right  now we got  a job to do. We  got  to find that sniper. I'm
personally  going to  waste  that  gook son-of-a-bitch. T.H.E.  Rock was the
first guy to get wasted after I took the squad. He's my responsibility."
     Alice double-times up the road. "That sniper is still there.  You can't
see him, but he's there."
     Cowboy doesn't say anything; he's looking at the long row of body bags.
He takes a few steps. I walk along with him.
     Mr. Shortround doesn't look  like an officer anymore. He's naked, lying
facedown on a bloody poncho. His  skin is yellow. His eyes are  dry in their
sockets, Dead, Mr. Shortround is just another meat-bag with a hole in it.
     Cowboy looks down at Mr. Shortround. He takes off his muddy Stetson.
     Donlon steps up to Mr. Shortround. There are tears in Donlon's eyes. He
fumbles with his handset. Donlon says, "We're mean Marines, sir." He hurries
away, fumbling with the handset.
     Alice  walks  up  to the  row of  body bags and kicks Mr.  Shortround's
corpse. "Go easy, bro."
     The squad files by.
     I kneel.  I fold the poncho over  Mr. Shortround's small body. I feel a
great need to say something to the green plastic lump with the human feet. I
say, "Well, you're short, sir."
     I think about  what I have just  said and I know that  making a bad pun
was a stupid thing to do. But then anything you  could say to a dead officer
who was killed by one of his own men would have to be pretty ridiculous.


     Rafter Man and I double-time to catch up with the squad.
     We hump  past scented lotus ponds,  through  landscaped  gardens,  over
bridges linking delicately structured pagodas.
     All around the beautiful gardens invisible gunships rip  into the peace
and quiet like dogs fighting in a church.
     Cowboy holds  up  his right hand. The  squad stops. Alice aims an index
finger at a street of big mansions.
     Cowboy looks at  me, then at the squad. Cowboy pulls me  aside. We walk
ahead for  a  few steps. "That sniper opened  up on us in a gook  graveyard.
Some guys in  One-One told  us they found gold bars in the Emperor's palace.
They had  all they could hump, so we was going to souvenir the rest." Cowboy
wipes  sweat from his eyes. "T.H.E.  Rock was walking point. The sniper shot
T.H.E.  Rock's foot off. Shot it off. The Hardass Squad went out to get him,
one at  a time. That sniper shot all their feet off.  We were hiding  behind
graves, those old round graves  like baseball mounds, and we had nine grunts
down  in the street...."  Cowboy pulls a red bandanna  from his back pockets
and wipes his sweaty  face. "Mr.  Shortround wouldn't let us go get them. It
made  him sick, but he held us back. Then  the sniper  started  shooting off
fingers,  toes,  ears--everything.  The guys in  the  road  were  crying and
begging and we were  all growling  like  animals, but Mr. Shortround held us
back. Then Animal  Mother  started  to go for  them and the Skipper  grabbed
Animal  Mother's collar and hit him in  the face. Animal Mother was so mad I
thought he was  going  to kill us all. But  before he could do  anything the
sniper  started putting rounds into  the  guys in the street. He didn't miss
more than a couple of times. He popped T.H.E.  Rock's head  off and then  he
put a round through each guy's head. They were all moaning and  praying  and
then it was quiet and they were dead and it was like we were dead too..."
     I don't know what to say.
     Cowboy spits, his face a  sweaty stone. "After the NVA  pulled out, the
lifers  sent in the  Arvin Black Panthers to take the Forbidden City.  Shit.
Nothing left but rear guard  squads. We stomped the NVA and they  stomped us
and  then the lifers send in the Arvins, like the goddamn Arvins did it. Mr.
Shortround  said it was their country, said we was only helping out, said it
would boost  the morale of the Vietnamese people.  Well, fuck the Vietnamese
people. The  horrible hogs in hard, hungry Hotel Company ran up  an American
flag. Like on Iwo Jima. But some poge officers ordered them to take it down.
The  snuffies had to run  up the stinking  Vietnamese flag, which is yellow,
which  is  the  right  color for  these chickenshit  people.  We're  getting
slaughtered in this  city.  And we can't even run up a fucking  flag. I just
can't  hack this shit, bro. My job is to get  my people back to the World in
one piece."  Cowboy coughs, spits, wipes his nose with the back of his hand.
"Under fire, these are the  best human beings in the world. All they need is
for  somebody  to  throw hand  grenades  at  them  for  the  rest  of  their
lives...These guys  depend on me.  I can't send my  people  out to  get that
sniper, Joker. I might lose the whole squad."
     I wait until I'm sure that Cowboy has finished  talking and then I say,
"That sounds like a personal problem to me, Cowboy. I can't tell you what to
do.  If I was a human being instead of a Marine, maybe I'd  know." I scratch
my armpit. "You're the honcho. You're the sergeant around here and you  give
the orders. You make the decisions. I could never do it. I could never run a
rifle squad. Never happen, bro. I just don't have the balls."
     Cowboy thinks  about  it.  Then he  grins. "You're  right,  Joker.  You
shitbird.  You're right.  I've got to get  my program  squared  away. I wish
Gunny Gerheim was  here. He'd know  what to do."  Cowboy thinks about it. He
grins. "Shit." He walks back to the squad. "Moving..."
     The squad hesitates. Crazy Earl has always been the one to say what is.
     Animal Mother stands up. He sets his M-60 machine gun into his hip.  He
doesn't speak. He looks at the dirty faces of the squad. He moves out.
     The squad collects its gear and gets to its feet.
     Cowboy waves his hand and Mother takes the point.


     We are discussing the best way to search the street house to house when
a tank rumbles up.
     Donlon says, "Hey, a tank! We can get it to--"
     "No," says Cowboy. "Number ten! We don't need any help."
     "That's affirmative," says Animal Mother.
     I say, "A tank could flush him for us, Cowboy. Think about it. We can't
budge gook grunts without supporting arms."
     Cowboy shrugs. "Oh, to hell with it."
     I  double-time down the road  to meet the tank.  I  run  past heaps  of
rubble  which  were houses yesterday, bricks  and stones and shattered  wood
today.
     The tank  jerks to a  halt. The turret whirs. The big ninety-millimeter
gun locks on me. For a long moment I think that the tank is going to blow me
away.
     The  top  half of the blond tank commander appears in the turret hatch.
The  lieutenant is wearing  a flak jacket and an olive-drab  football helmet
with  a microphone that protrudes over  his lip. He is a mechanical centaur,
half man, half tank.
     I  point out the mansions and I explain about the sniper, about how the
sniper wasted our bro and all that good shit.
     Cowboy comes over  and tells the lieutenant to "wait  one"  and then to
start wasting the mansions, one after another.
     The blond tank commander is silent. He gives us a thumbs-up.


     Cowboy sends Lance Corporal Stutten and his fire team around behind the
row of mansions.
     Animal Mother sets up his M-60 on a low wall and opens fire, raking the
mansions at random. Every fifth round is a tracer.
     The tank rolls up to the first mansion.
     The rest of  us double-time down an alley  and cross the road a hundred
yards down the street, at the end of the row of mansions.
     At the opposite end of the street sits the tank. The tank fires a round
of high explosives. The upper  story  of the first house is blown apart. The
roof collapses.
     Animal Mother continues to fire from his position near the tank.
     Cowboy double-times  to the first house at our end  of the  street.  He
steps carefully to the  rear corner  of the house, peeks  around the corner.
Cowboy waits  for  Lance Corporal  Stutten to pop a green smoke as  a signal
that his fire team is in position as a blocking force.
     We wait.
     When green smoke  begins to pour from a drainage ditch behind the first
house  at  the far end of the street Cowboy  waves his hand  and we all open
fire  at the first house  at our  end of the street. One at a time,  we  run
across the street to the first house, joining Cowboy.
     Cowboy  waves his hand around the corner and  Lance Corporal  Stutten's
fire team opens up with their weapons on full automatic, pouring hundreds of
high-velocity  copper-jacketed  bullets into the rear of  the first house at
their end of the street.
     Animal Mother continues to chew up the fronts  of all the mansions with
his black steel machine gun.
     The tank fires a second round. The  ground floor of  the first house is
blown apart. The tank grinds  forward  twenty yards, stops, fires again. The
second story of the second house explodes.
     Cowboy leads  us into the mansion at our end of the street. Inside,  we
leapfrog  from corner to corner. Cowboy pops  a  frag and underhands it into
somebody's kitchen. The detonation rocks the whole house, numbs our ears.
     Rafter Man steps forward. He gestures to Cowboy, jerks his thumb at the
ceiling.  Cowboy holds up  a circled  thumb and index finger, "okay." Rafter
Man pops  a  frag  and pitches it up  a stairwell to  the  second story. The
explosion splits the plaster over our heads.
     Outside, up the street, the tank fires again.
     Cowboy punches  me  in  the chest  with his  knuckles. Then he  punches
Rafter Man and Alice. He  aims his right index finger at Donlon, then at the
deck.  Donlon nods and begins to silently point out the  positions he  wants
the men in the squad to take.
     Cowboy waves his hand and we follow him up the stairs.
     Upstairs, Alice kicks out a window and we all hop out onto the roof.
     The tank is two houses away. It fires.
     We drop our gear and jump the six-foot chasm between houses.
     On the roof  of  the  second  house  Cowboy  stands up and signal Lance
Corporal Stutten,  who  waves  back  with  his  poncho.  Bullets  from Lance
Corporal  Stutten's  fire  team stop hitting  the  rest of  the  house we're
standing on.
     I double-time to the front  of the house and I wave  to Animal  Mother.
Bullets from  Animal Mother's machine  gun  stop hitting  the  front  of the
house.
     The tank fires. The shell bursts. Shrapnel whines over us.
     We converge on a skylight. I drop a frag through the glass.
     The grenade explodes  in an  invisible room  below. Concussion shatters
the skylight.
     We  drop through the ragged rectangular hole into  somebody's  library.
Shrapnel has mangled leatherbound books. I pick up a small leatherbound book
for  a souvenir. The author is Jules Verne; the title is in  French. I stuff
the book into  my thigh pocket and reach  to the front of my flak jacket for
another grenade.
     We work our way through  the house, fragging every hallway, every room.
But we can't find the sniper.
     The tank fires into the second story of the house next door.
     I say, "No time."
     Cowboy shrugs. "He wasted T.H.E. Rock."
     I take a few steps down the stairs. Cowboy holds up his hand. "Listen."
     Animal Mother's M-60 is ripping up the roof over our heads.
     I say, "Is Mother dinky-dow? Crazy?"
     Cowboy shakes his head. "No. Mother is a prick, but he's a good grunt."
     We run back to the library.
     We drag a heavy antique  desk to the ruined skylight  and Cowboy climbs
up onto it and lifts himself back onto the roof.
     The crack of  a  Simonov sniper's  carbine  pierces the muted rhythm of
Mother's machine gun.
     Cowboy falls back through the skylight. Alice, who has climbed up  onto
the desk, catches Cowboy and eases him down to the desktop.
     I pop a  frag. I  climb up onto the desk and take hold of the roof with
my left hand.  I let the spoon fly. The  spoon  phinnnnings away and rattles
across the  floor.  I  hold the  sweaty green  oval  for  three seconds and,
lifting myself up, I flip it up and  back  so  that it rolls across the roof
directly over us. The frag  bursts, spraying  seven hundred and fifty pieces
of  steel  wire  across  the roof. The  ceiling  splits. Alice  hugs Cowboy.
Plaster and splintered wood bounce off my helmet.
     Rafter Man jumps up onto the desk and lift himself up onto the roof.
     Surprised, I pull myself up after him.
     The tank fires into the ground floor of the house next door.
     Rafter Man and I crawl on our bellies on the roof.
     Behind  us, Alice lifts  Cowboy over his head like a wrestler, deposits
him gently  upon the roof. Then  Alice climbs  up. He picks Cowboy up in his
arms as though Cowboy were an oversized baby.
     Doc Jay calls to us from the roof of the first house.
     Alice pulls a  tent rope from a thigh pocket and ties it under Cowboy's
arms.  He flips the  other end  of the rope to Doc  Jay. Doc Jay gets a good
grip on the  rope and braces himself as  Alice lowers Cowboy into  the chasm
between  the houses.  Doc  Jay pulls in the slack as Cowboy  falls. Cowboy's
limp body  swings over and  thuds into the wall beneath Doc Jay's  feet. Doc
Jay grits his teeth, pulls Cowboy up. Alice looks back at me, but I wave him
on. He leaps over to the first house.
     Doc Jay  gathers up all  of  our gear and Alice  throws Cowboy over his
shoulder and they start back down.
     Rafter Man has crawled up to the crest of  the roof. He  peeks over the
crest.
     Bang. A hiss.
     I crawl  up beside Rafter Man. I take a peek. From behind a low chimney
at the opposite corner of the roof a thin black line protrudes.
     We  hear the incredibly  loud clanking of the tank  as it rolls  on the
street below. It stops.
     Animal Mother and Lance Corporal Stutten stop firing.
     "Let's go," I say. I grab  Rafter Man's shoulder.  "The tank can  waste
the gook."
     Rafter Man doesn't look at me. He pulls away.
     I turn away and  I duck walk to the edge of the roof. I stand up and am
about to jump across when the house explodes beneath me.
     I fall on my back.
     The sniper is moving.
     Rafter Man jumps over the crest of the roof and slides down the incline
on his ass.
     I try  to stand up. But all  of my bones have shifted one  inch  to the
left.
     Suddenly a foot steps on my  chest, pinning  me. The sniper looks down,
surprised. The sniper sees  that  I'm helpless,  glances back at Rafter Man,
gets ready to jump across to the other roof.
     Rafter Man  runs back up the  incline and slides back down on his  ass,
ten yards away.
     I reach for my grease gun.
     The sniper turns toward Rafter Man and raises her SKS carbine.
     The sniper is  the first Victor  Charlie I've seen  who was  not  dead,
captured, or far,  far away. She is a child, no more than fifteen years old,
a slender Eurasian angel with dark, beautiful eyes, which, at the same time,
are the hard eyes of a grunt. She's not  quite five feet tall.  Her  hair is
long and black and shiny,  held together by rawhide cord  tied in a bow. Her
shirt  and shorts  are mustard-colored khaki  and look new. Slung diagonally
across  her  chest,  separating her small breasts, is a white cloth tube fat
with  sticky reddish rice.  Her  B.F. Goodrich  sandals  have  been cut from
discarded tires. Around  her tiny waist hangs  a web belt  from which dangle
homemade hand grenades  with hollow wooden handles,  made by  stuffing black
powder  into Coca-Cola  cans,  a  knife  for cleaning fish,  and six  canvas
pouches containing banana  clips  for the  AK-47  assault rifle slung on her
back.
     Bang. Rafter Man is firing his M-16. Bang. Bang.
     The sniper lowers her weapon. She looks at Rafter Man. She looks at me.
She tries to raise her weapon.
     Bang. Bang.  Bang.  Bang.  Bang.  Bullets  shock flesh.  Rafter Man  is
firing. Rafter Man's bullets are punching the life out of the sniper.
     The sniper falls off the roof.
     The tank fires into the ground floor beneath us. The house shakes.
     I stand  up. I feel like a dead man's shit. I walk to the front  of the
house. I wave to the blond tank commander. He swings a fifty-caliber machine
gun around and aims it at me. I step into full view on the edge of the roof.
I wave an "all clear."
     The tank commander gives me a thumbs-up.
     I pop a green smoke grenade and I drop it on the roof.
     I limp over to the skylight and I climb back down into the library.
     Rafter Man has already jumped into the  library and is running down the
shrapnel-scarred stairs.
     Down on the street I watch as the tank rolls up to the last house still
standing. I wave another "all clear" and the tank commander gives me another
smile and another thumbs-up and then the tank fires, blasting the top floor.
If fires again, blasting the ground floor.
     The  tank commander's  great mechanical body  grumbles  contentedly and
rumbles away.
     Cowboy  double-times to  meet  me.  He punches  me  on the arm. "Look!"
Cowboy touches his right ear, carefully. "Look!" There's a neat little round
hole through his  right ear and a semicircular  nick on the top of  his left
ear.  "See? A  cheap Heart!  The round went through the helmet from  behind,
spun all  the way around my head, then came  out  and hit me in the  arm..."
Cowboy holds up his right forearm, which has already been bandaged. "Did you
see that tank? Was that tank bad? What a honey."
     Doc  Jay  catches up  to Cowboy,  grabs him roughly,  pushes  him down.
Cowboy sits on a splintered tree stump while Doc Jay  tears  the  waxy brown
wrapper  off a compress bandage and ties the bandage around Cowboy's  bloody
head.
     Alice and I walk around to the rear of the house.
     We  find  Rafter  Man standing over the  sniper,  drinking a  bottle of
Coca-Cola. Rafter Man grins. He says, "Things go better with Coke."
     Animal Mother walks up and Rafter Man says, "Look at her! Look at her!"
     We all  stand  over the sniper.  The sniper is drawing her breath  with
great effort. Guts that look like colorful plastic have squirted out through
bullet holes. The back of  the sniper's right leg and her right buttock have
been torn off. She grits  her teeth and then makes  a sound like a dog  that
has been run over.
     Lance  Corporal Stutten  leads  his fire  team to  the sniper. "Look at
that," says Lance Corporal Stutten. "It's a girl. She's all busted up."
     "Look at her!" Rafter  Man is saying. He struts around the moaning lump
of torn meat. "Look at her! Am I bad? Am I a menace? Am I a life taker? Am I
a heart breaker?"
     Alice kneels  and  unbuckles the sniper's web belt  and jerks  it  from
under  her body. The  sniper  whimpers. She  speaks  to us  in French. Alice
tosses the bloody belt to Rafter Man.
     The sniper begins to pray in Vietnamese.
     Rafter Man asks, "What's she saying?"
     I shrug. "What difference does it make?"
     Animal Mother  spits. "It's gonna get dark. We  better hump back to the
company area."
     I say, "What about the gook?"
     "Fuck her," says Animal Mother. "Let her rot."
     "We can't just leave her here," I say.
     Animal Mother takes a giant step toward me, puts his  face up  close to
mine.  "Hey,  asshole,   Cowboy  is  down.  You're  fresh  out  of  friends,
motherfucker. I'm running  this  squad. I was a platoon sergeant before they
busted me. I say we leave the gook for the mother-loving rats."

     Rafter  Man  is  buckling on his  NVA belt. The belt has  a dull-silver
buckle with a star engraved in the center. "Joker is a sergeant."
     Animal Mother is surprised. He stares  at Rafter Man, then at me. Then:
"That don't cut no shit out here. This is the field, motherfucker. You ain't
a grunt. You don't pack the  gear to  be  a grunt. You want to fuck with me?
Huh? You want to throw some hands?"
     I say, "I  wouldn't run  this squad  for  a  million  dollars. I'm just
saying that we can't leave the gook like this."
     "I don't care," says Animal Mother. "Go on and waste her."
     I say, "No. Not me."
     "Then we saddle up and move...now."
     I  look at the  sniper. She whimpers. I try to decide what I would want
if  I were down, half dead,  hurting  bad,  surrounded by my enemies. I look
into her eyes, trying to find the answer. She  sees me. She recognizes me--I
am  the one who will end her  life. We share a bloody intimacy. As I lift my
grease gun she is praying  in  French. I  jerk the trigger.  Bang. One round
enters the sniper's left eye  and as the bullet exits it tears off  the back
of her head.
     The squad is silent.
     Then Alice grunts, flashes a big grin. "Man, you are one hard dude. How
come you ain't a grunt?"
     Cowboy and Doc Jay are standing beside me.
     Cowboy  says, "Mother,  I'm  serviceable.  Joker, that's a  well  done.
You're hard.'
     Animal  Mother spits.  He takes a  step, kneels,  zips out his machete.
With  one powerful blow  he chops off  her head. He picks the head up by its
long  black hair  and  holds it high. He laughs  and says, "Rest  in pieces,
bitch." And he laughs  again. He walks around and sticks the bloody ball  of
gore  into   all  our  faces.  "Hard?  Now   who's  hard?  Now  who's  hard,
motherfuckers?"
     Cowboy  looks  at  Animal  Mother and  sighs. "Joker  is hard,  Mother.
You...you're just mean."
     Animal Mother pauses, spits, throws the head into a ditch.
     Cowboy says, "Let's move. We done our job."
     Animal  Mother  picks  up his  M-60  machine gun,  lays  it  across his
shoulders, struts over to me. He smiles. "You know, Shortround never did see
the frag that wasted him, that little kike." Animal Mother  unhooks  a  hand
grenade from the front of his flak jacket and pushes it into my chest--hard.
Mother looks around, then  smiles at me again. "Nobody  shits on the Animal,
motherfucker. Nobody."
     I hook the grenade onto my flak jacket.
     Alice picks up the sniper's rifle. "Hey, number one souvenir!"
     Rafter  Man  is standing over the sniper's  decapitated corpse. He aims
his M-16 and fires  a long burst  of automatic fire into  the  body. Then he
says,  "That's mine,  Alice." He takes  the SKS from  Alice and  examines it
closely. He looks  down and admires his new belt. "I shot her first,  Joker.
She'd have died. That's one confirmed for me."
     I say, "Sure, Rafter. You wasted her."
     Rafter Man says, "I  did. I  wasted her. I  fucking blew her  away." He
looks at his NVA  rifle belt  again. He holds up the  SKS.  "Wait  until Mr.
Payback sees this!"
     Alice is down on his knees beside the corpse. With his machete he chops
off the  sniper's feet. He puts the feet into his blue canvas shopping  bag.
He chops off the sniper's finger and takes her gold ring.
     We wait until Rafter Man takes photographs of the dead gook and we wait
until Alice takes photographs  of  Rafter Man posing with his SKS set in his
hip and his foot on the mutilated remains of the enemy sniper.
     Then,  as we're moving out, Rafter Man sees a reflection of his face in
the  jagged teeth of a shattered  window, sees  the new smile upon his face.
Rafter Man stares at himself for a long time and then, dropping the carbine,
Rafter Man just walks off down the road, not looking back, not responding to
our questions.
     Cowboy waves his  hand  and we  move  out. Nobody  says anything  about
Rafter Man.
     We hump back to the Forbidden City and set in for the night.
     I mark the short-timer's calendar  on my flak  jacket--fifty-five  days
and a wake-up left in country.
     Later, in the dark, Rafter Man comes back.
     The fighting continues all around us  all night,  sputters of  violence
here and there, a mortar round, a curse, a scream.
     We sleep like babies.


     The  sun  that rises  in  Hue  on  the morning  of February  25,  1968,
illuminates a dead  city. United  States Marines  have  liberated Hue to the
ground. Here,  in  the  heart of the ancient imperial capital of Viet Nam, a
living shrine to the Vietnamese people on both sides, green  Marines  in the
green machine  have liberated a  cherished past. Green Marines  in the green
machine have shot the bones of sacred ancestors. Wise, like Solomon, we have
converted Hue into rubble in order to save it.


     The  next morning Delta  Six  cuts us  some  slack and we spend the day
hunting gold bars in the emperor's palace.
     We enter the throne room of the old  emperors. The throne is blood red,
studded with inlaid mirrors.
     I wish I could  live in the Imperial Palace. Bright pieces of porcelain
make the walls  vivid.  The  roof is orange tile.  There  are stone dragons,
ceramic urns, brass cranes standing on the backs of  turtles, and many other
fine  objects  of undetermined  origin and  function but obviously of  great
value and great beauty and very old.
     I  walk  out into the  emperor's  magnificent garden.  I find Alice and
Rafter Man looking  at some crispy  critters. It's impossible  to  determine
which army the men were from. Napalm leaves less than  bones.  I  say,  "The
aroma of roasted flesh is, admittedly, an acquired taste."
     Alice laughs. "This is such a fucking waste. I mean, this place is like
a  magic  temple, you know?  The  gooks love this place.  Blowing it away is
like, oh, blowing away the White House.  Except  that  nobody  gives  a shit
about the White House and this place is ten times as old."
     I shrug.
     "It's crazy," Alice says. "It's just plain fucking crazy. I  wish I was
back in the World."
     I  say, "No,  back in the World is the crazy part. This, all this world
of shit, this is real."
     Cowboy comes around later and  says that Delta's company commander  has
passed the word to regroup on the beach at the Strawberry Patch.
     We march. We look at the rubble  we have made. We get tired of  looking
at it; there's so much of it.


     Twilight.
     What's  left of Delta  Company, 1st Battalion,  Fifth Marine  Regiment,
First Marine Division, is sprawled  all  over the beach down by the River of
Perfumes. The bearded grunts are sleeping, cooking chow, bragging, comparing
souvenirs,  and reenacting every moment of  the  battle, real and  imagined,
every man a hero beyond belief.
     The Lusthog Squad is wasted. We have nailed our names into the pages of
history enough for today. Canteens  come out. It's too hot to cook so we eat
cold C's.
     Some of the guys are getting to their feet.
     Donlon stands up, shouts, "LOOK!"
     Five hundred yards north there is an island in the River  of  Perfumes.
On  the  island a semicircle of miniature tanks is converging upon a frantic
colony of  ants. The ants  drop  their  gear and  sling  their AK-47 assault
rifles over their backs and they jump into the river. The ants swim for it.
     All  of  the tanks  open fire with  ninety-millimeter  shells and  with
fifty-caliber machine guns.
     Some of the ants sink.
     Cobra gunships  buzz  out of  a horizon  that  is the color of lead and
swoop in for the kill.
     The ants swim faster.
     The hovering gunships chop up the brown water with their machine guns.
     The ants swim, dive, or, in their panic, drown.
     Delta Company gets onto its feet.
     Three  Cobra gunships zoom down to  within a few yards of the river and
the helmeted  door  gunners machine-gun the ants as they flop in  the water,
trapped in a  syncopated hurricane of hot air beating down from the swirling
rotor blades, trapped in the water  while their  red  life runs  out through
bullet holes.
     Only one ant reaches the river bank. The ant opens fire at the gunships
as they hover over the water like monsters feeding.
     Someone says, "See that shit? He's hard-core."
     One gunship  detaches itself from the blood feast and skims across  the
River of Perfumes. The chopper drops bullets all  over the beach, all around
the ant.
     The ant runs off the beach.
     The gunship zooms back to feed on the ants in the water.
     The ant runs onto the beach and opens fire.
     The  gunship  banks sharply  and comes in  low,  rockets swooshing from
under its belly and machine guns chattering.
     Again, the ant runs off the beach.
     The gunship is halfway back  to the ants in  the water when the  ant on
the beach reappears and opens fire.
     This time the gunship pilot brings his ship in low enough to decapitate
the ant with the chopper's skids. The gunship fires.
     The ant fires.
     Machine-gun bullets knock the ant over.
     The gunship swings around to verify that it is a confirmed kill.
     As machine-gun bullets snap into the wet sand, the  ant stands up, aims
its  tiny AK-47  assault rifle, and fires  a  thirty-round magazine on  full
automatic.
     The Cobra gunship  explodes, splits open like  a bloated green egg. The
gutted carcass of  aluminum  and plexiglass bounces along, suspended  in the
air, burning, trailing black smoke. And then it falls.
     The flaming chopper hits the river and the flowing water sucks it down.
     The  ant  does  not  move. The  ant  fires  another  magazine  on  full
automatic. The ant is shooting at the sky.
     Tired  of  firing into  floating corpses, the  remaining  two  gunships
attack.
     The ant walks off the beach.
     The gunships hit  the beach and sand  dunes  with every weapon  they've
got. They circle and circle and  circle  like predatory birds.  Then, out of
ammunition and out of fuel, they buzz straight into the horizon and vanish.
     Delta Company applauds and cheers and  whistles. "Get some! Number one!
Out-fucking-standing! Payback is a motherfucker!"
     Alice says, "That guy was a grunt."
     While we wait  for the gunboats  to come  and  take us back across  the
River of Perfumes we talk  about how the NVA  grunt was one  hell  of a hard
individual and about  how it would be okay if he came to America and married
all our sisters and about how we all  hope that he will live to be a hundred
years old because the world will be diminished when he's gone.


     The next  morning, Rafter Man and I get the map  coordinates  of a mass
grave from  some green  ghouls and we  hump over  to the site to get Captain
January his atrocity photographs.
     The  mass grave  smells really  bad--the odor of  blood,  the  stink of
worms,  decayed human  beings. The Arvin  snuffies doing  the  digging in  a
school  yard have all tied olive-drab skivvy  shirts around their faces, but
casualties due to uncontrollable puking are heavy.
     We  see corpses  of  Vietnamese civilians who  have been  buried alive,
faces frozen in  mid-scream,  hands like  claws,  the fingernails bloody and
caked  with damp  earth. All of the dead people are  grinning  that hideous,
joyless grin of those who  have heard the joke,  of those who have  seen the
terrible secrets of the earth. There's even the corpse of a dog which Victor
Charlie could not separate from its master.
     There are no corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. However,
the green ghouls assure us that they have seen such corpses elsewhere.  So I
borrow  some demolition wire from the Arvin snuffies and, crushing the stiff
bodies with my knee until dry bones crack,  I bind up a family, assembled at
random from the multitude--a  man,  his wife, a  little boy, a  little girl,
and, of course, their dog. As a final touch, I wire the dog's feet together.


     Noon  at  the  MAC-V  compound.  We say  good-bye to Cowboy  and to the
Lusthog Squad.
     Cowboy  has found a  stray puppy and is carrying the bony little animal
inside his shirt. Cowboy  says to me, "Keep your ass down, bro.  Scuttlebutt
is, the Lusthog Squad is headed up to Khe Sanh, a very  hairy  area. But  no
sweat; we  can hack  it. And maybe they got some horses  up there. So if you
ever feel hard enough to be a real Marine, a grunt, bop up to see us."
     I pet Cowboy's puppy. "Never happen. But  you  take  care, you piece of
shit. We've got a date with your sister I don't care to miss."
     Rafter Man  says good-bye  to Alice and  to the other guys in  Cowboy's
squad. He shakes hands with  Cowboy and pets Cowboy's puppy. In my best John
Wayne voice I say, "See you later, Mother."
     Animal Mother says, "Not if I see you first."


     Rafter Man and  I  ditty-bop down Route One, south,  toward Phu Bai. We
hump in crushing heat for hours, looking for a ride. But  the sun is without
mercy and there are no convoys in sight.
     We sit  in  the shade  by the road. "It's hot," I  say. "It's very hot.
Wish that old mamasan was here. I'd souvenir beaucoup money for one Coke..."
     Rafter  Man  stands  up. "No  sweat. I  can  find  her..."  Rafter  Man
ditty-bops into the road.
     I  start to say something about how it might  be a good idea for us  to
stay  together.  There are still  plenty  of  NVA  stragglers  in the  area.
"Rafter..." But then I remember that Rafter Man  has got his first confirmed
kill. Rafter Man can take care of himself.


     The deck trembles. A tank?  I look up, but I can't see anything  on the
road.  Yet nothing on earth sounds as big as a tank, nothing  produces  that
terrible rumble  of metal like a tank. It shakes my bones. I jump up, weapon
ready. I look up and down the road. Nothing. But all around me is the clamor
of rolling iron and the odor of diesel fuel.
     Rafter Man is  walking across the  road. He does not hear the invisible
tank. He does not feel the mechanical earthquake.
     I double-time after him. "Rafter!"
     Rafter Man turns around. He grins. And then we both see it. The tank is
an object of heavy metal forged from  a cold shadow, a ghost with substance.
The black mechanical phantom comes  for us, dark  ectoplasm  rolling in  the
sun. The blond tank commander stands  in the turret hatch,  staring straight
ahead and into the beyond, laughing.
     Rafter Man turns around.
     I say, "Don't move."
     But Rafter looks at me, panic on his face.
     I grab his shoulder.
     Rafter Man pulls away and runs.
     The tank is bearing down on me. I don't move.
     The tank swerves, misses  me, roars past  like  a big iron  dragon. The
tank runs over Rafter Man and crushes him beneath its steel treads. And then
it's gone.
     Rafter Man likes on his back in the dirt, a crushed dog spilling out of
its skin. Rafter  Man looks at  me the  way he looked at me that  day at the
Freedom  Hill  PX on  Hill  327 in Da Nang. His  eyes are  begging me for an
explanation.
     Rafter Man has been cut in half just  below his new NVA rifle belt. His
intestines are  pink  rope all over the  deck. He is trying to pull  himself
back  in,  but it  doesn't work. His guts are wet and  slippery and he can't
hold them in.  He tries to reinsert  his spilling guts back into his severed
torso.  He tries  very hard to  keep  the  dirt  off of his intestines as he
works.
     Rafter Man stops trying to save himself and, instead, just stares at me
with an expression that might be  found on the face of a person who wakes up
with a dead bird in his mouth.
     "Sarge..."
     "Don't call me 'Sarge,'" I say.
     I kneel  down and pick up Rafter's black-body Nikon.  I say, "I'll tell
Mr. Payback about  your belt  and about  your SKS..." I want so much to cry,
but I can't cry--I'm too tough.
     I stop talking to  Rafter  Man because Rafter  Man is dead. Talking  to
dead  people  is not  a healthy habit for a living  person to cultivate  and
lately  I have been talking  to  dead people  quite a lot. I guess I've been
talking to dead people ever since I  made my first confirmed kill. After  my
first confirmed  kill,  talking  to corpses began  to make more  sense  than
talking to people who had not yet been wasted.
     In Viet  Nam  you see corpses almost every  day.  At  first you  try to
ignore them.  You don't want people to think you're curious. Nobody wants to
admit that corpses are not old hat to them; nobody wants to be a New Guy. So
you see lumps of dirty rags. And  after a while you begin to notice that the
lumps of dirty rags have arms and legs and heads. And faces.
     The first time  I saw a  corpse, back when I was a New Guy, I wanted to
vomit, just  like in the movies. The corpse was an NVA  grunt who died in  a
great orange  ball of  jellied gasoline near  Con  Thien. The  napalm left a
crumbled  heap  of  ashes  in the  fetal  position. His mouth  was open. His
charred fingers were covering his eyes.
     The  second  time  I  really looked at a  corpse I was embarrassed. The
corpse was an old Vietnamese woman with teeth which had turned black after a
lifetime of chewing betel  nuts. The woman had  been hit by something bigger
than small-arms fire. She was killed in a  crossfire between ROK Marines and
NVA grunts in Hoi An. She seemed so exposed in death, so vulnerable.
     My  third corpse was a  decapitated Marine. I stumbled over  him on  an
operation  in the A Shau valley. My reaction was curiosity. I  wondered what
the rounds had felt like as they entered  his body,  what  his  last thought
was, what his last sound  was at  the  moment  of impact. I  marveled at the
ultimate  power  of  death.  A  big  strong  American  boy,  so vibrant  and
red-blooded, had become within minutes a yellow lump of inflexible meat. And
I understood that my own weapon  could do this dark magic thing to any human
being. With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any  enemy with
just the  slightest pressure of  one finger. And, knowing that,  I was  less
afraid.
     The  fourth  corpse  is the last  one  I  remember.  After that they've
blurred together,  a mountain of faceless dead. But I think  that the fourth
corpse was the old papasan in the conical white hat  I saw on Route One. The
old  man  had been run over by a six-by as  he squatted in the road taking a
shit. All I remember is that when I marched by, flies  exploded off  the old
man like pieces of shrapnel.


     I got my first confirmed kill with India Three-Five.
     I was writing a feature article about how the grunts at the Rockpile on
Route Nine had to sweep  the road for mines every morning before any traffic
could use the road. There was a fat gunny who insisted on walking point with
a  metal  detector. The fat gunny wanted to protect his people.  He believed
that fate killed the careless. He stepped on an antitank  mine. A man is not
supposed to be heavy enough to detonate an antitank  mine, but the gunny was
pretty fat.
     The earth opened up and hell came out with a roar that jarred my bones.
The fat  gunny was  launched into the  clean  blue sky,  green and round and
loose-jointed like a broken doll. I watched the fat gunny float up to heaven
and then a wall of heat slammed into me and I collided with the deck.
     The fat gunny floated back to earth.
     Although shrapnel had stung my face and  peppered my flak jacket, I was
not afraid. I was very calm. From the moment the mine detonated I knew I was
a dead man, and there was nothing I could do.
     Behind  me  a  man was  cursing.  The man  was  a  Navy  corpsman.  The
corpsman's right hand  had been  split open  and he was holding  his fingers
together with his good hand and cursing and yelling for a corpsman.
     Then  I understood that the "shrapnel" I'd felt had only been shattered
gravel.
     Grunts from the security squad were  crawling into the  bushes, turning
outboard, weapons ready.
     Still  confused  about  why I was  still  alive I  got to  my  feet and
double-timed to the  little  pit  that  had  been torn into the  road by the
explosion.
     Two  grunts were  double-timing across a  meadow toward  a treeline.  I
followed them, my finger on the trigger of my M-16, eager to  pour invisible
darts of destruction into the shadows.
     The  two grunts and  I  ran until  we  passed through  the treeline and
emerged on the edge  of a vast  rice paddy. There the fat gunny was floating
on   his  back  in  the  shallow  water,  surrounded   by  dark  pieces   of
do-it-yourself fertilizer.
     The  grunts spread a poncho under  him while I stood security.  Both of
the gunny's legs had been torn off at the pelvis. I saw one of his  fat legs
floating nearby so I picked it up out of the water and threw it in on top of
him.
     We all took hold of the poncho and started carrying the heavy load back
to the road. I was breathing hard,  and the black anger  was pounding inside
my chest. I was watching the trees, hoping I'd see movement.
     And then out  of nowhere a man appeared, a tiny, ancient farmer who was
at the same  time ridiculous and dignified. The ancient farmer  had a hoe on
his shoulder and was wearing the obligatory conical white hat. His chest was
bony and  he looked so old. His sturdy legs were scarred. The ancient farmer
didn't speak to us. He just stood there beside the trail with rice shoots in
his hand, calm, his mind rehearsing the hard work he had to do that day.
     The ancient farmer  smiled. He saw the frantic children with their  fat
burden  of  death and he  felt sorry for us.  So he  smiled to  show that he
understood  what  we  were  going  through. Then my M-16  was  vibrating and
invisible metal missiles were snapping through the ancient  farmer's body as
though he were a bag of dry sticks.
     The ancient farmer looked at me. As he fell forward into the dark water
his face was tranquil and I could see that he understood.
     After  my first confirmed kill  I began to understand  that it  was not
necessary to understand. What you do, you become. The insights of one moment
are blotted  out by the events of  the next. And no amount  of insight could
ever alter the cold, black  fact of what I had done.  I was  caught up  in a
constricting web of darkness, and,  like the  ancient farmer, I was suddenly
very calm, just as I had  been calm  when the mine detonated, because  there
was  nothing I  could do. I  was  defining myself  with bullets;  blood  had
blemished my Yankee Doodle dream that everything would  have a happy ending,
and that I, when  the  war was over,  would return to  hometown America in a
white silk uniform,  a  rainbow  of  campaign ribbons across my chest, brave
beyond belief, the military Jesus.


     I think about my first kill  for a  long time. At  twilight  a corpsman
appears. I explain to him that Marines never abandon their dead or wounded.
     The  corpsman  looks  at each  of  Rafter  Man's  pupils several times.
"What?"
     I shrug. I say, "Payback is a motherfucker."
     "What?" The corpsman is confused. The corpsman is obviously a New Guy.
     "Tanks  for the memories..." I  say, because I  do not know how to tell
him how I feel. You're a machine gunner who has  come to the end of his last
belt. You're waiting, staring out through the barbed wire at  the little men
who  are  assaulting  your position. You see their tiny toy-soldier bayonets
and  their  determined,  eyeless faces, but you're a machine  gunner who has
come to the end of his last belt  and there's nothing you can do. The little
men are  going to grow and grow and  grow--illuminated by the fluid, ghostly
fire of a star flare--and then  they're going to run up over you and cut you
up with knives. You see this. You know this. But you're a machine gunner who
has come to the end of  his  last  belt  and there's  nothing you can do. In
their distant fury the little men are  your brothers and you  love them more
than you love your friends.  So  you wait for the little men to come and you
know you'll be  waiting for them when they come because  you no longer  have
anywhere else to go...
     The corpsman is confused.  He does not understand why I'm smiling. "Are
you okay, Marine?" Yes, he is a New Guy for sure.
     I ditty-bop down the road. The corpsman calls after me. I ignore him.
     A mile away from the place of fear I stick out my thumb.


     I'm dirty, unshaven, and dead tired.
     A Mighty Mite slams on its brakes. "MARINE!"
     I turn, thinking I've got some slack, thinking I've got a ride.
     A  poge colonel pounces  out  of  the jeep,  marches  up  to  face  me.
"MARINE!"
     I think: Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me? "Aye-aye, sir."
     "Corporal, don't you know how to execute a hand salute?"
     "Yes, sir." I salute. I hold  the salute until  the  poge colonel snaps
his hand to his starched barracks cover and I  hold  the salute for an extra
couple  of second before  cutting it away sharply. Now he  poge  colonel has
been identified as an officer to any enemy snipers in the area.
     "Corporal, don't you know how to stand to attention?"
     Right away I start wishing I was back in the shit. In battles there are
no police, only people who want to shoot you. In battles there are no poges.
Poges  try to kill you on the inside.  Poges leave your body intact  because
your muscles are all they want from you anyway.
     I stand to attention,  wobbling slightly  beneath the  sixty  pounds of
gear I'm humping.
     The poge colonel has  a classic granite  jaw. I'm sure  that the Marine
Corps must  have a strict examination at  the officers'  candidate school at
Quantico designed to eliminate all officer  candidates  who lack the granite
jaw.
     His jungle utilities  are razor-creased, starched to the consistency of
green  armor.  He executes a  flawless Short Pause, a favorite  technique of
leaders of men, designed to inflict its victim with fatal insecurity. Having
no desire  to damage the colonel's self-confidence, I respond with  my  best
Parris Island rendition of I-am-only-an-enlisted-person-I-try-to-be-humble.
     "Marine..." The colonel stands ramrod straight. This stance is the  Air
of Command,  intended  to intimidate me,  despite the  fact  that I'm a foot
taller  and  outweigh  him  by fifty  pounds. The  colonel investigates  the
underside  of my chin. "Marine..." He likes that word. "What is that on your
body armor, Marine?"
     "Sir?"
     The poge  colonel stands on tiptoe. For a moment I'm afraid he's  going
to bite me in the  neck. But he only  wants to breathe on  me. His  smile is
cold. His skin is too white. "Marine..."
     "Sir?"
     "I asked you a question."
     "You mean this peace button, sir?"
     "What is it?"
     "A peace symbol, sir..."
     I wait patiently  while the colonel tries  to remember the "Maintaining
Interpersonal Relationships with  Subordinate Personnel" chapter  of his OCS
textbook.
     The poge  colonel continues  to  breathe all over  my face.  His breath
smells of  mint.  Marine Corps officers are not allowed to  have bad breath,
body odor, acne pimples, nor holes in their underwear. Marine Corps officers
are not allowed to have anything that has not been issued to them.
     The colonel jabs my button with a forefinger, gives me  a fairly decent
Polished Glare. His blue eyes sparkle. "That's right, son, act innocent. But
I know what that button means."
     "Yes, sir!"
     "It's a ban-the-bomb propaganda button. Admit it!"
     "No, sir." I'm in real pain. The man who invented standing at attention
obviously never humped any gear.
     "Then what does it mean?"
     "It's just a symbol for peace, sir."
     "Oh,  yeah?" He breathes faster, up close  now,  as though he can smell
lies.
     "Yes, Colonel, it's just--"
     "MARINE!"
     "AYE-AYE, SIR!"
     "WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!"
     "AYE-AYE, SIR!"
     The  poge  colonel moves around  me, stalks me. "Do you call yourself a
Marine?"
     "Well..."
     "WHAT?"
     "Crossed fingers, king's-X. "Yes, sir."
     "Now  seriously,  son..." The  colonel  begins  an  excellent  Fatherly
Approach. "Just tell me who gave you that button. You can level with me. You
can trust me. I only want to help you." The poge colonel smiles.
     The colonel's smile is funny so I smile, too.
     "Where did you get that button, Marine?" The colonel looks hurt. "Don't
you love your country, son?"
     "Well..."
     "Do you  believe that the United States should allow the Vietnamese  to
invade Viet Nam just because they live here?" The poge colonel is struggling
to regain his composure. "Do you?"
     My  shoulders are about to fall off. My  legs are falling  asleep. "No,
sir. We should bomb them back to the Stone Age...sir."
     "Confess, Corporal, confess that you want peace."
     I give him a Short Pause. "Doesn't the colonel want peace...sir?"
     The colonel hesitates. "Son, we've all got to keep our heads until this
peace craze blows over. All I have ever asked  of my boys  is that they obey
my orders as they would obey the word of God."
     "Is that a negative...sir?"
     The poge colonel tries to think of some more inspiring things to say to
me, but  he has used them all  up.  So he s