Death Coming Up the Hill (9 page)

found out, Angela pounded

my chest, then collapsed

 

into me, sobbing.

She agreed to meet at the

Greyhound bus depot

 

to say goodbye and

swore she would keep my secret

until I was gone.

★  ★  ★

Waiting for the bus,

we sat on a wooden bench

holding hands, talking,

 

and kissing like there

was no tomorrow—and I

learned that mourning starts

 

with goodbye. When I

stood to leave, I gave her my

MIA bracelet.

 

My DI at Fort

Polk loved to say, “Boot camp will

make men out of boys,”

 

but he really meant

that boot camp turns hearts of flesh

into hearts of stone.

 

You can't kill if you

feel. For eight grueling weeks, we

ran, climbed, crawled, fought, fired,

 

and ran some more on

little food and less sleep. I

dropped into my bunk

 

each night like a dead

man, only to be rousted

before the sun cracked

 

the horizon, and

except for five minutes a

week, I had neither

 

the energy nor

the time to write letters home

or think anything

 

but what the Army

expected me to think. I

graduated and

 

posed for my Army

photograph, staring like I

was dead serious.

 

I belong to the

101st Airborne now,

and our CO said

 

we should all buy life

insurance, so I did, and

before I deployed,

 

I made sure my pay

goes to Mom—and if I don't

make it, she'll get the

 

insurance, too. A

humid hell is my home now,

with death lurking in

 

jungle shadows. I

flinch at everything, and my

M16's always

 

ready to kill. On

night patrols, two things keep me

going: survival

 

and the people I

love. I dream of Rosa, Mom,

Angela—even

 

Dad—and wonder if

they're looking at this same moon,

thinking about me.

 

Hill 937

 

Dug in, waiting for

Operation Apache

Snow to launch. My fox-

 

hole feels too shallow.

I can't stop the sweats and shakes:

Am I sick—or scared?

 

If you can't read this,

it's because I am writing

it in a hurry.

 

I see Death coming

up the hill, and I am not

ready to meet him.

The last two stanzas of this book are based on an American soldier's letter written shortly before he died in the assault on Hamburger Hill in May 1969. His letter appeared as part of an article, “One Week's Dead,” published in
Life
magazine on June 27, 1969. The full text can be viewed online:
http://life.time.com/history/faces-of-the-american-dead-in-vietnam-one-weeks-toll/#1
.

The official death toll for U.S. soldiers in Vietnam in 1968 is 16,592. If you're a numbers person, you'll notice that the sum of the weekly death counts Ashe reads in the newspapers is something less than 16,592. Here's why:

1. By 1968, the war in Vietnam was extremely unpopular, so it's likely that the weekly press releases underreported the dead to minimize the tragic consequences of our involvement in Southeast Asia.
   
2. Even if military leaders wanted an accurate weekly death count, tallying the numbers was difficult because of the nature of the war. Some units in distant parts of Vietnam simply may not have been able to submit their reports on time—or at all.
   
3. MIAs were not counted as dead until their bodies were recovered and identified, a process that could take more than a year.
   
4. In the chaos of war, even a dedicated clerk made mistakes. Such mistakes probably would not have been caught before the weekly report was announced.
   

There is no database that lists the 1968 casualties by week, so I did what Ashe would have done: I reviewed the Thursday edition of daily newspapers for each week's death count. The numbers that head each chapter are the numbers reported in newspapers in the fifty-two weeks that comprised 1968.

When historical novelist Gary D. Schmidt visited my classes at BYU in 2010, he mentioned that more U.S. soldiers died in 1968 than in any other year of the Vietnam War. A year later, I started working on a novel set in 1968 and decided to see if Schmidt had been right. It turned out he was: 16,592 American soldiers died in 1968. As I began digging into the history, I also learned that the weekly casualty reports appeared in newspapers each Thursday, but by 1968, the reports had become so commonplace that many Americans barely noticed them. I wanted my main character to notice and become fascinated by the death counts as he gained an awareness of the troubled world around him.

I started writing the novel in prose, but after a few chapters, the project stalled. Rather than give up, I tinkered with the prose, with the point of view, with the character's voice, but nothing seemed to help. In an early draft, I had enjoyed inserting historical information like Ashe's birthday, May 17, 1954, the date of the U.S. Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education,
and that's when the prime number 17 started growing on me, so I looked for other opportunities to plant the number into the story. Playing with numbers was fun for a while, but it soon became clear that no amount of number play would revive my manuscript.

During this period of writer's block, I woke up early one morning with the story on my mind, and as I lay in bed, I started thinking about the number 17 and the other numbers that appeared in the story and wondered how I might use them. What else relied on 17? Well, haiku has 17 syllables; maybe I could have my character write haiku as a hobby. Or maybe I could divide the book into 17 sections and have a haiku introduce each section. What else? Was 1968 divisible by 17? It'd be cool if it was. The 1968 death toll, 16,592, was a big number, and I wondered if it might be divisible by 17. I rolled out of bed, found a calculator, and punched in the numbers. Guess what? The number 1968 isn't evenly divisible by 17, but 16,592 is: 16,592 divided by 17 equals 976.

Then a jolt of creative surprise shook me. What if I wrote the novel entirely in haiku? What if the novel contained one syllable for every U.S. soldier who died in 1968? What if the entire story were contained by a syllable count? It sounded crazy. It sounded like a stupid gimmick. It sounded impossible. But I decided to try it anyway.

The novel took off. Of course, the format was maddening, and revision was incredibly complicated. I soon learned that when your writing is bound up in clusters of 17 syllables arranged in lines of five, seven, and five, a single word change ripples forward and backward and causes much more rewriting and wordsmithing than I could have imagined.

The number 17 had one more surprise for me. Without my planning it, that prime number came into play in the book's final scene. I wanted Ashe to be writing about 1968 in retrospect and decided to do some research to find out what had been the bloodiest week in Vietnam in 1969. It was the battle of Hamburger Hill, a few days in the middle of May. Somehow it seemed fitting to end Ashe's story there, but it wasn't until the umpteenth revision that I discovered that by using Hamburger Hill as the concluding event, I had Ashe's story end on his 18th birthday: May 17, 1969. It seemed like a fitting way to bring his story and the number 17 full circle.

I'm grateful to many people for this book. First, to the men and women who served their country during the Vietnam era in a horrendous war, and to the families that supported them. Next to the historians who documented not only the war but also everything else that rocked the world in 1968. My agent, Patricia J. Campbell, encouraged me to try the prose-to-haiku revision, and after reading a few chapters, she pressed me to take it further. Christy Hughes provided a careful and very smart read of an early version of the manuscript and offered detailed suggestions for revision that proved helpful in rewriting the manuscript. Dr. Jesse Crisler read through the first full draft and gave me suggestions on historical details that reshaped my revisions. John H. Ritter read a near-final copy of the manuscript and offered wisdom and feedback that helped me fine-tune the story. My editor, Karen Grove, took a gamble on this story and its format and helped me reshape the novel and stick to the 17-syllable, five-seven-five stanza consistently from start to finish. Finally, I must thank my wife and best friend, Elizabeth, the new girl who showed up in one of my high school classes in 1969 and who has changed my life for the better ever since.

 

C
HRIS
C
ROWE
, a professor of English at Brigham Young University, has published award-winning fiction and nonfiction for teenagers, poetry, essays, books, and many articles for academia and magazines. He is a popular speaker and writer with librarians and teachers, and received the 2010 Ted Hipple Service Award from ALAN, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. He lives with his wife in Provo, Utah.

 

www.chriscrowe.com