The Phantom Blooper (27 page)

"You know I did."

"Typical messianic complex."

"See? I can't talk to you. You're not real. You're just a box of words."

The Commander says, "Let's say for the sake of argument that you did in fact defect to the Communists. And that you may have killed American military personnel."

I say, "People. I may have killed people. It was my gun, but you pulled the trigger. And I never defected to the Communists. Communism is boring and does not work. But if the federal government of the United States died, I'd dance on its grave. I've joined the side of people against the side of governments. I've gone back to the land. When Americans lost touch with the land, we lost touch with reality. We became television. I don't want to be television. I'd rather kill and be killed."

"But how can you morally justify trying to kill your own people?"

I say, "How can I morally justify trying to kill anybody of any country? I killed Viet Cong soldiers, but I didn't kill them because they were evil human beings. I killed them because I believed they were wrong. It's not personal. The War for Southern Independence proved that you don't have to hate people to fight and kill them. The Americans I fought were not bad men. They were some of the finest looters and killers I ever run with. But they were on the wrong side. You have to shoot a rabid dog, even if it's your best dog. I've been loyal to what's right and I have been betrayed by my country."

Commander Bryant throws his pencil onto his desk. "You can't seriously expect me to believe that."

I stand up and walk to the wall. I take down one of the doctor's many medical diplomas. I select one that has fancy printing on it that looks like the icing on a wedding cake. "Well, you can believe it, not because I said it but because I did it." I turn the diploma over, slide out the cardboard backing, and pull out the diploma. "Action is expression. Attitude is posing."

I fold the diploma. I say, "I have been a prisoner of the war, and that has given me a very bad case of existential jet lag, profound and permanent. Ordinarily, I'm not one to hold a grudge, but I am a Viet Nam veteran and the White House has murdered forty thousand of my friends."

The Commander watches me, his mouth open, with just a trace of trembling in his sweaty upper lip.

I fold the diploma into a paper airplane. "War makes you nervous, but it also provides you with opportunities for therapeutic action." I throw the paper airplane across the room. The paper airplane lands on the Commander's desk and crashes into his second-place trophy from the Cape Cod Yachting Club.

The Commander grits his teeth and says, "You are a traitor in time of war." He slams his palm down hard on his desk. "With paranoid psychotic tendencies."

I say, "I'm not a traitor in time of war. War has not been declared by Congress. There is no war. Only the muscle flexing of an Imperial President. The thing I don't like about pogues is that you love rules, but not logic. I renounce my right to citizenship in an idiot's world. Your ignorance is as hard as iron. And it is willful ignorance, ignorance by choice and by design. Of course, more than one person has accused me of having a bad attitude. But don't worry, you fucking pogue lifer, you're safe, the pogues always win, sooner or later. Nobody likes a man who means what he says. In the land of mutants, plain talk is deadly poison and the man who means what he says will be hanged."

"You, Private, are clinically insane."

I laugh. "I roger that I've been hitting Maggie's drawers in my wild shots at sanity. Was Colonel Tibbets insane when he dropped a bomb on Hiroshima and vaporized a hundred thousand people? No, Doc, I'm only half crazy. If I have survived--and I'm not sure I have survived--it's only because I have a genius for staying only about half crazy."

Commander Bryant suddenly jerks open a desk drawer and digs out a manila file folder. "Oh, really? Well, smart guy, take a look at these photographs and tell me what you see."

The first dozen snapshots are of dead Marines photographed where they fell in the field in Viet Nam.

I say, "Can I keep these?"

"Of course. But why?"

"I want to show them to civilians back in the World. A picture is worth a thousand words." I put the snapshots into the cargo pocket of my utility trousers.

Commander Bryant opens another desk drawer and brings out a brown file folder. He pulls out a handful of eight-by-ten glossies and drops them onto the desk in front of me.

I flip through the photographs. Bad lighting. Obviously the pictures were made in a morgue. A dead man on a slab. The dead man is my father. "Your mother has already remarried."

Commander Bryant says, "Yes. You killed him. That's right. You killed him. He killed himself. He died of shame."

I say, "You're wrong. My father trusts me."

Commander Bryant is astonished. "Is that all you've got to say? Come on, let's hear your smartass comeback to those pictures. "

I place the photographs back into the brown file folder and I drop the file folder onto his desk.

"Do not take prisoners," I say, "and do not allow yourself to become one."

Walking back to the transient barracks after visiting Ranks and the quadriplegic Seabee and the Crispy Critter tanker in the recovery ward, I see some Navy hospital orderlies standing in a group, smoking cigarettes, and watching a Marine grunt who won the Congressional Medal of Honor at Con Thien. The grunt has a flesh-colored plastic leg. He's pulling a shit detail, policing up cigarette butts.

The squid orderlies laugh and smoke their cigarettes and make remarks, just loud enough to hear, and they thoroughly enjoy that unexplainable gut-level poisonous hatred that men who have skated being in a shooting war can sometimes feel for less fortunate men who have been forced to meet themselves face to face in battle and have survived.

Like a woman who has never given birth, the man who has not faced death and inflicted death will for all of his life feel somehow not quite complete. Combat veterans are completely puzzled and bemused by the strangers who try to start fistfights with veterans in bars to prove how tough they are. Macho civilians envy the veteran for something the veteran, or at least some veterans, would be only too happy to transfer, or get rid of, like bad memories, or a plastic leg.

The soldier's war comes and goes, and ends. But noncombatants search endlessly for substitutes for war and attach to war that esoteric glamor which always attaches itself to the unattainable. It's like talking to a race of people whose big disappointment in life is that they will never be survivors of the sinking of the Titanic, will never be one of the chosen few who can proudly say that he had his hands burned off in the crash of the Hindenburg.

Veterans quickly learn that the fantasies of aspiring war heroes and the realities of the experience of war, what you gain for a short time and what you lose forever, can never be bridged. As the Spanish say, there is only one man who knows, and that is the man who fights the bull.

I greet the limping Marine policing up cigarette butts and we give each other a thumbs-up.

Last night a Recon buck sergeant who made the decision that the rest of his life would not be life locked himself in the laundry room and hanged himself with his pajama bottoms.

Marines know how to die without wasting anybody's time. Vein grafts break in the night. Grunts cough up pieces of metal and die. Nineteen-year-old boys go yellow in the face, then gray, and don't say a word. The orderlies find them in the morning.

If you want to make a sculpture of a Marine who has been blown away and fucked up totally, all you have to do is drop a living brain onto a pile of raw hamburger meat on a gurney and hammer the whole mess through and through with railroad spikes and ten-penny nails. Then you set fire to the brain.

Now when I visit my friends in the recovery ward I try not to look at the things in the beds, because I've been here before and I know the question they all want to ask:
Will any of us ever be human again?

The clerk at casual quarters says, "S-2 called, joker. Your orders are in. I picked them up for you."

I say, "Thanks, bro." The clerk hands me a manila envelope, then bows.

The casual company clerk is wearing a red silk kimono sewn with white tigers and blue dragons. On his feet are black leather combat boots, without laces. The lump under the kimono is the colostomy bag that hangs under his arm. The North Vietnamese Army pulled his intestines out and stomped them into the dirt. For the rest of his life the clerk will shit through his armpit into disposable plastic bags.

The clerk once said to me, "I've been in a war and I've been in a hospital. That's my life."

I look at my orders. Somebody in the chain of command finally made a decision about me and cut me some travel orders. I'm not going to be shot. I'm being given an honorable discharge as a Section Eight, a medical discharge they give to crazy people. I've got a lot of money on the books in back pay for the time I was a prisoner of war. I'm to report to the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, California, for immediate discharge.

Bowing to the company clerk, I say, "Go easy, bro. You owe it to yourself."

As usual, the company clerk is smiling. He has always been an easy audience for my jokes. The casual company clerk smiles a lot because he no longer has any lips.

I walk over to transient barracks, wondering if maybe my orders could be some kind of clerical error, like when they let that lady out of the deathcamp by mistake.

The barracks is deserted. Transient barracks in casual company is always deserted because the garrison squids see transient Marines as slave labor on the hoof and nobody wants to be press-ganged into some shit detail or working party.

Most of the racks aren't occupied and the mattresses are bent double on bare springs.

While I'm packing a small AWOL bag for outposting, two civilians in cheap Hong Kong suits come into the barracks.

One guy is young, tall, slender, tanned, and has perfect white teeth. He has blond hair, blue eyes, well-developed muscles, and he reeks with good health and vitality.

The other spook is middle-aged, with reptilian eyes, jowls, and the exaggerated black brow line of a Neanderthal.

The perfect team: the Surf Nazi and the Missing Link.

The Surf Nazi says, "We talked to your head doctor about you, boy. He says you threatened to make a stink, request mast, go to the newspapers, if we kept you in an isolation ward, or if we tried to shitcan you on a DD--a dishonorable discharge."

I say, "So who the fuck are you? CIA? NSA? G-2? S-2? FBI? Staff Counter-Intelligence? Consulate representatives? Office of Special Assistants to the Ambassador?"

"N.I.S.," says the Surf Nazi.

"Yeah," echoes the Missing Link. "We're N.I.S."

I squat, Vietnamese-style. I say, "Naval Investigative Service." I laugh. "More spooks."

Using a window as his mirror, the Missing Link takes quick puffs on a cigarette while he clips his nose hairs with shiny little scissors.

The Surf Nazi says, "You're gonna pull brig time. You are guilty of violating Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military justice: aiding the enemy and misconduct in the face of the enemy. Both carry the death penalty. We could shoot you, boy. I'm talking firing squad. We will Eddie Slovik your ass. We got you on a charge of soliciting American soldiers to lay down their arms. Yeah, so you pulled a little tour of duty with the pajama boys. Well, we are going to deep-six you for collaborating with the enemy in time of war. Davis, you're history."

I say, "I didn't collaborate. I joined up. I enlisted."

"Then you confess that you're a traitor to your country?"

I say, "I confess that I'm a traitor to the federal government. The federal government is not the country. It likes to think it is, and it damned sure wants honest citizens to think it is, but it's not. I believe in America more and have risked more for America than any incestuous nest of parasites who call themselves Regulators. Thomas Jefferson never dropped napalm on peasants. Benjamin Franklin did not shoot students for protesting an illegal war. George Washington could not tell a lie. My government of self-righteous gangsters makes me ashamed to be an American. I secede from your Viet Nam death trip."

The Missing Link says, "We will court-martial you for treason. We will keep you here on bad time for-fucking-ever, sweetheart. We will red-tape you to death."

"Get out of my face, you pathetic simpleton. What are you going to do, send me to Viet Nam?"

The Missing Link puffs away inside a cloud of cigarette smoke.

The Surf Nazi opens a window.

The Missing Link says, "You're freezing me. You're driving me crazy, always opening windows."

The Surf Nazi says, "You're poisoning me. You're giving me cancer.

"It's low tar!"

"I don't like the smoke , says the Surf Nazi. "It stinks."

The Missing Link puffs.

The Surf Nazi says, "Show him."

"No," says the Missing Link, "I don't want to show him. I don't like him."

The Surf Nazi says, "Go on. Show him. I'm hungry."

The Missing Link grumbles, says, "Yeah, I guess I'm hungry too." He pulls some papers from the pocket inside his coat and gives them to me. The papers are Xerox copies of newspaper clippings from half a dozen big newspapers. The headlines say: MARINE PRIVATE CAPTURED and TORTURED BY CONG and BRAINWASHED BY COMMUNISTS and WAR HERO DEEP-SIXED ON SECTION EIGHT. One clipping features a photograph of me proudly accepting a Silver Star. Some big General I never saw in my life is pinning the medal to my chest. The headline reads: GYRENE POW HERO AWARDED MEDAL FOR VALOR.

My father's death was not from shame. I'm a hero.

The Surf Nazi says, "Talk to the newspapers. Tell them your delusions. Try to be a guru for the hippie scum that is protesting the war. Would the Marine Corps make a hero out of a defector? You're brave, you're loyal, but you're a little bit confused, that's all. And understandably so. You're just not packing a full seabag, boy. You're one sandwich short of a picnic."

I say, "I understand. You're afraid to admit that anyone might choose to fight you. Might give people ideas. No American soldier can ever be portrayed as resisting the government of America, because too many people would ask why, too many people would ask what went wrong, and there are no erasers on spook pencils."