Saving Room for Dessert (16 page)

“There were twelve APCs in all. First three were done in the first five seconds. But at the end of the column, this FNG was
drivin’ the last one. I didn’t know him except his nickname was Hog, ’cause he would eat all the C rations nobody else would
touch. And he couldn’t see anything but the APC right in front of him, so he didn’t know what was goin’ on, and the asshole
wouldn’t believe us, the guys that were runnin’ back, all the guys that could move, they bailed just like me, and here comes
the lieutenant walkin’ back like he’s on the beach lookin’ for seashells, just amblin’, you know? And his right arm is gone,
blood’s spurtin’ out like a hose, man, and obviously he’s in shock, and guys’re screamin’ at him to get down, and he makes
it all the way back to where I am and just keels over, you know, face-first. So I knew he was dead. Which was lucky for me
’cause he was still carryin’ his M-16 in his good hand. So then I had somethin’ to shoot with.

“But those slopes, man, they had us out there in the open—and I’ll never understand this—if they would’ve just spread out
along that tree line? They would’ve got us all. They would’ve got us all in the first five minutes—if it had taken that long.
Man, the only cover we had was the first three, the ones they blew the tracks off of. If they’d’ve spread out, they could’ve
got the rest easy, ’cause when we stopped we closed up, we were way too close together, we were only like ten, twelve meters
apart.

“And the worst part was we couldn’t convince this Hog asshole to turn his track around and get outta there. He kept sayin’,
where’s the lieutenant, where’s the lieutenant? I ain’t movin’ till the lieutenant tells me, and I’m tryin’ to tell the jagoff
the lieutenant’s dead, and the captain, the company CO, I figured he had to be dead too, ’cause he was in the second track,
so I’m screamin’ at him, you know, turn this thing around and get outta here, you’re blockin’ everybody, nobody can move,
and the idiot just sits there. So I did get scared when I shot him. A little bit. Afterwards.”

“You shot him?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t turn his track around, and he wouldn’t get outta the driver’s seat, so …”

“So you shot him?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh … dead?”

“Yeah dead. He wouldn’t move. Kept hollerin’ he was only takin’ orders from the lieutenant, I kept tellin’ him the lieutenant
was dead, he wouldn’t believe me, I tried pullin’ him outta the seat, he pulled his .45, told me to get away from him, meanwhile,
we’re takin’ RPGs fast as they can load ’em, he’s wavin’ his .45 at me, then somethin’ hit the turret, I didn’t know what,
but it made him turn around, take his eyes off me for a second and, uh, when he did I shot him. I mean, he might as well’ve
been sittin’ there with both his tracks blown off—except they weren’t. And on both sides of us are all these rubber trees,
I mean those APCs are powerful, but they couldn’t flatten trees thick as those rubber trees. So how were we supposed to get
outta there if we didn’t move the last track in line? It was a narrow road. Couldn’t go around him.”

“Well obviously you did get out.”

“Yeah. But not right away. Not for six or seven hours we didn’t. We got turned, around, the ones that could move, eight of’em,
but we only got, I don’t know, maybe eight hundred, nine hundred meters back that road and I guess we got hit with a hand
grenade or maybe a satchel charge, I don’t know what, I just know we lost our right track, and then we were stuck again. And
started takin’ fire. Broadside. I found out later, it was a small unit of VC, maybe twenty guys, maybe not that many, and
for some reason, after they blew the track on our right, all they had was AKs. I mean, they didn’t have any rockets, which
believe me … man, if they’d’ve had them, we would’ve been slaughtered. ’Cause the goofy thing, I mean, the NVA behind us?
Who were the ones in front of us when they opened up? I mean we were only like a thousand meters from them. They should’ve
been nailin us. But after the first couple seconds they never hit another one of us. Either we were farther away from them
than I thought or else they must’ve used up all their RPGs in the first couple minutes. ’Cause after that it was just the
ones on our right givin’ us hell, they had us pinned there for, I don’t know, hours. I took one in the arm, and then another
one, it hit me in the helmet, bounced off my skull, knocked me out, for I don’t know how long. When I finally woke up, we
were on our way back to the base camp. Which was really strange. We never did get any artillery support, and when we finally
got air support, they were already cuttin’ out—that’s what I was told anyway. I mean … it was just all fucked up. Which was
the way everything was there. But anyway for the most part, I was just, uh, you know, unconscious. But we really got shot
up. I mean we weren’t at full strength by anybody’s count, but we started out with what was supposed to be a company, and
there was only like, I don’t know, maybe thirty guys made it back in one piece.”

“But if I understand you, the only time you were afraid was when you thought about shooting this driver, this Hog.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Why? Well if somebody wanted to make somethin’ of it, I mean, hey, that was murder. I mean even I knew that. In the army
that’s a capital offense. They hang you.”

“And that’s what you were afraid of? Hundreds of enemy soldiers firing at you for hours and that’s the only thing that frightened
you, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I knew I could get hung for that. And if I got hung I was never gonna be a cop.”

“Are you being facetious?”

“You mean am I jokin’? No. Uh-uh. That’s the way I used to think when I was there. See, let me explain somethin’. When I first
got there, I knew that none of the training I went through back here, none of that was gonna make any difference. I mean it
was all blanks, you know? There was only this one time they had us crawlin’ under barbed wire while they were firin’ live
rounds over us with a couple machine guns, but even an idiot knew that as long as you kept your belly on the ground you weren’t
gonna get hit. I mean, c’mon, they weren’t gonna kill any of us to prove a point, that’s ridiculous.

“But I knew once I got over there, anybody shootin’ at me if they saw me crawlin’, they weren’t gonna be aimin’ two feet above
my butt. So I made up my mind, I was gonna find the sharpest guy in my unit, the one who’d been there the longest and who
everybody looked up to, and I was gonna follow him around like tan on sand till I learned everything he knew.”

“So you didn’t consider, uh, the randomness of death in combat?”

“Randomness? You mean luck?”

“Yes. That no matter what you did, you couldn’t protect yourself from the, uh, utterly hit-or-miss aspect of life or death
there.”

“No. And I’m not stupid. I didn’t think I was immortal, or un-killable, or whatever. But the whole time I was flying over
there, the whole way across the Pacific, I kept telling’ myself over and over, learn as much as you can as fast as you can,
don’t be a hero, dig fast, keep your weapon clean. I know it sounds like so much bullshit, but that’s the way I thought. I
wouldn’t allow myself to think that no matter what you did or didn’t do you could still get killed. That was too … I couldn’t
live with that … I had to believe that I was gonna survive because of what I learned … and I knew that fear would keep me
from learnin’ it.

“I mean fear is fear, everybody’s afraid of something’. I mean the noise … Jesus, the noise of war, man, it’s … it’s unbelievable.
But no matter what, the thing you can’t allow to happen is that you get so afraid you get paralyzed. ’Cause you … I mean,
you get panicked, you get your heart bangin’ so hard you think it’s gonna bust right out your sternum, I mean, that is not
the way to control your body. And you gotta control your body when you’re under that kinda … extreme stress like that. That’s
what I learned from Jukey Johnson.”

“The smartest man in your unit?”

“Oh absolutely. Smartest, most observant, coolest, most experienced. We’d go on patrol, or go set up an ambush, he was always
out front. I asked him why he did that. He was the platoon sergeant, senior NCO in the platoon, he didn’t have to do that.
Half the time he was there he was our platoon leader. All those lieutenants, they didn’t last too long. But he said he didn’t
trust anybody to see what he could see, or could hear, or could smell, or just, you know, sense it. That’s why he was out
front. So I just attached myself to his back. He didn’t like it at first, didn’t trust me at all. But that was his third tour
there, I mean I never met anybody else had been there more than two. Only him.”

“So was he a lover of war? Combat? Death? Killing? A seeker of extreme stimulation? A stimulation addict perhaps?”

“That’s a dumb question.”

“Oh? Why?”

“’Cause that’s what I asked him, and that’s what he said to me.”

“Surely he said something else to justify himself. Or to explain himself, to rationalize his behavior.”

“Well, among other things, he was from Mississippi. Same town where they killed those three Freedom Riders, remember? Those
two Jewish kids and that colored kid?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well he said the army was the only place where crackers had to treat him with respect because of his rank and the ribbons
on his chest. He’d been in fourteen years and was on his third tour in Nam when I met him—I said that before, right?”

“Right.”

“Plus, he’d done somethin’ like seven, eight months in Korea before the armistice got signed there, so he’d seen a lotta shit
hittin’ a lotta fans, and when he finally started trustin’ me, he told me everything. Said I was the first cracker he ever
trusted. Last two months he was there, we used to take turns on point, that’s how much he trusted me.”

“And you thought what he told you would keep you alive.”

“It did.”

“If you think it did, then I suppose it did.”

“There’s no supposin’ about it. It did.”

“It’s not for me to say whether your beliefs were founded in reality. If you believed they were real, then for you they were.”

“What you’re sayin’ is there’s a difference between what’s real and what we perceive as real. Lotta people say that, even
Balzic says that.”

“Oh I’m sure he does.”

“Well I can’t argue that. Except when I was there. I’ll argue that till the day I die about what I learned from Jukey Johnson.”

“Listen, James, it’s not my function here to be purposely contentious, but the fact is I served in the marines in World War
Two. I was on Okinawa. Went ashore in the third wave, and when it was over I walked up the ship’s ladder under my own power.
I have no idea how I survived. Nearest I came to being wounded was that I nearly lost my toes from foot rot. But my perception
of that reality on that island for those who fell all around me is that death or mutilation in modern warfare is absolutely
random. It has not the slightest rationality to it. No amount of study or wisdom or insight or intuition will keep you alive
if you happen to be standing where the bullets are flying or the shells are exploding. It’s simple physics, understandable
to the average high school kid, but how those physics are applied, why one man dies, another loses both arms, another his
eyes, another goes insane, and yet another doesn’t suffer a scratch—it’s totally irrational.”

“Yeah, okay. I get what you’re sayin’, but see, I told you before, I couldn’t let myself believe that. I would never’ve lasted
a week if I’d let myself believe that. I would’ve been … I mean, I would’ve been paralyzed with fear. I don’t know how many
times I saw it happen. The first day, when I got dropped off in my unit’s base camp, it was at a place called Cu Chi, and
right after I got off the chopper, I could hear these boom boom, and then again two more, boom boom, and then a couple seconds
later three more, and this guy, he was walkin’ toward me, when he heard the first two he just dropped, right into this big
puddle, and he just curled up and started cryin’. And they were way off, these noises, I could see the smoke from them, but
they were at least a couple hundred meters from us, way out there. But this guy was just a pile of clothes in the middle of
a puddle.

“And this colored guy walked up, asked me for my orders, and when I tried to hand ’em over, I had to wait till he pulled this
guy to his feet and then he looked at my orders and told me to help him take this guy to the aid station, and then he took
me back to his area and introduced me as an FNG. But I’ll never forget the way this colored guy was lookin’ at everything,
his eyes, they never stopped movin’, they were constantly scannin’ everything, me, everything behind me, the guy in the puddle,
I said to myself, hey, this guy knows somethin’. And I found out real soon, sure enough, he knew everything, man. And I mean
everything.”

“So he survived. And you did too by learning what he knew. So you think that, uh, you perceived that as the way you survived.”

“No. He didn’t survive. I mean he survived Nam. But after his tour was over, he went on leave back to Mississippi, and some
cracker ran him down with a truck, broke both his legs, crushed his pelvis, broke coupla vertebra in his lower back. He’s
in a wheelchair. I mean, he survived, he’s alive. But he can’t walk.”

“You stay in touch with him?”

“Try to. Call him every month or so, see how it’s goin’. That wasn’t random either.”

“Excuse me? How so?”

“This cracker thought he was with some civil rights workers. Thought he was there to stir up some trouble, you know, it was
like two, three weeks after Martin Luther King got shot. But he just happened to pick that time to take his leave, that’s
all. Fact was, those civil rights workers, I mean, they were bustin’ his balls about bein’ in the man’s army, over there killin’
his Vietnamese brothers and all that crap. So this cracker sees him talkin’ to those people, he’s in civvies, cracker must’ve
figured he’s one of them. And first chance he gets he runs him down.”

“And you don’t think that was random?”