One to Count Cadence

10. Vietnam

For the next ten hours, until the convoy reached Hill 527, I sat in the stifling darkness of the truck, glad of the darkness, pleased with the heat of my own body. None of the ordinary things, none of the expected emotions came to me; no vomiting, only those few warm tears no more real than the glycerin dripped on an actor's cheeks. First there had been cold anger, then calculated madness, and now nothing, so much nothing that I was glad when Morning noted my silence and said, remembering that I knew his secrets, hoping that I would now have a secret guilt too, "What's the matter, Krummel? War not to your taste? The intellectual warrior get sick to his dilettante stomach? Don't be sick, man, that's your war back there, your lovely war incarnate in that sliver of flesh. People die in wars, you idiot…"

Even then I couldn't raise an answer, a spark of feeling.

Oh, I had things to say: No, Morning, not my war, baby, but yours; he wasn't killed in a war, he was murdered.

But these were thoughts without feeling.

Of course it must rain our first two days at Hill 527, air mattresses and shelter halves must leak, and men sweat and stink in ponchos, or stand naked in hard, cold rain, or fall prey to malaria and cat fever and fungus. Boots must mildew, and meals be cold, and mud ball at our feet and creep up our legs and stick to our fingers and clog in our eyes. Sleep must come in nightmare snatches, and guard be stood, and waiting drift in long cross hours, and of course it must rain without pause for two days and two nights square in the middle of the dry season. And of course the sun must shine, eventually. And it all must be endured.

Hill 527 and its twin, 538, were not really big hills, but tall rises in the middle of a large clearing where a jungled forest encroached on a grassy plain. Five hundred and thirty-eight was a gentle rise, an easy slope up and down from all sides, and 527 was the same except for a flat triangular peak like a surrealistic nipple smack in the middle of it. The sides of the nearly equilateral triangle were approximately one hundred yards long. A forty degree slope separated the flat nipple-top from the more gentle slopes below it. On the first two muddy days we laid wire around the steeper slope, dividing us from the two companies of provincial militia already entrenched in a rough circle about fifty yards further out and down. Outside of their wire and their mud and sandbag parapets, the grass and the occasional patches of brush had been cut down for about one hundred yards. The jungle was on three sides of the clearing, east, west, and north, but on the open side the land sloped away in rolling, grassy hills. The jungled forest came to within four or five hundred yards of the compound on the north and east, but because of Hill 538, it was between nine hundred and one thousand yards away on the west. Our antenna field was to be built on 538, and then the whole hill mined.

All in all, it wasn't a bad position. The peak was high enough so that we, if we had to, could fire on the lower slopes without chewing up the protective coating of Vietnamese militia. The militia had good wire out, and we had wire ten yards wide, two fences and four rows of concertina on the slope off the peak. (The harried American major who advised the Vietnamese major commanding the militia said he wished that we hadn't strung the wire between our two forces. The Vietnamese major thought it an insult to both the patriotism and the fighting ability of his men. Capt. Saunders showed them his orders signed by the admiral in charge of American forces in the Pacific, the area military commander, and the major's commanding officer, so the wire stayed, and we stayed alive.) We dug a four-foot deep trench along the inner edge of the wire with twenty rifle positions on each side of the triangular peak, then put machine gun bunkers at each point of the triangle, a communication trench midway across the triangle, north to south, connecting to the ammo and gas bunkers, then dug mortar pits at the four corners of the trapezoid formed by the communication trench and one behind the eastern point. A spotting tower was erected over the mid-point of the communication trench, and a CP and guard mount bunker dug under it. All the trenches were dug in a regular wavering curve so that a man could step around half a curve and be away from a grenade explosion. After this was done, we began slit trenches all over the compound, laid Claymore mines to protect the western side and gate, and constructed a concrete landing pad for choppers, south and west of the gate, inside of the outside wire.

All this work, which was not nearly the total work we would do, took the first week, a hard week of digging and filling sandbags, of sleeping on the ground under shelter halves, of cold rations, and lots of heavy guard duty. Thirteen men had left on med-evac choppers, ten with fevers and/or malaria, two with infected shovel cuts, and one who couldn't stand the waiting; but we were beginning to feel secure, as if hard work could keep death away, as if dying could be endured like manual labor, but Capt. Saunders set us straight.

"We have no intention," he said, "of being impregnable, because the intention would be foolish. The VC could take this Det any time they wanted to pay the price. The trick is not to be impregnable but expensive."

Some trick, but we were dug in, dug out, and halfway ready.

On the third day of the second week, the troops were still busy, raising squad tents with wooden floors, a four-foot protective wall of mud between two rows of logs on the three open sides of the lower half of the triangle, and digging bunkers for ammo, gasoline, and a guardshack command post radio room. Four rhombic antennae were being erected on Hill 538, now known, of course, as the Other Tit. A log cutting detail had gone off to the edge of the forest on the north to cut trees for the wall and the bunker roofs. I had mounted guard details for the log cutters and the antenna builders, then finished drawing up the guard roster for perimeter duty, two men in each M-60 position, two men at the west gate, a walking guard on each of the three sides, and a man in the spotting tower, day and night.

The paperwork had bored me, so I left my tent to check guard posts, then climbed up the steel spotting tower in the center of the compound. I stayed there a bit, bumming a cigarette from the kid on duty. I was trying to quit for physical and professional reasons. Morning had tried to give me a bad time about it, and about wearing my watch with the face against my wrist, and carrying a.45 automatic, and the tiger-striped camouflage coveralls I used as a uniform of the day, and the razor-sharp bayonet slung in the scabbard sewn on my right boot, and the combat harness, etc. He couldn't piss me off, though. Quite frankly, I felt above such minor emotions, minor griefs, even above the constant irritant of dysentery which I, like the rest of the Det, seemed to have caught out of the air. Like a Trojan on the walls, or a Kamikaze pilot, I felt anointed, and afraid.

As I smoked, the day became perceptibly hotter, but a fragment of morning air drifted under the hot steel roof and I stayed a moment longer. Inside the outer perimeter, children played, wives gossiped, and their soldier husbands and fathers sat in shaded places and cleaned their old Springfields. Smoke from cooking fires ascended stiff columns straight into the ashen blue sky, but sounds wafted about the compound like the odor of burning charcoal: a soft curse and a grunt of pick into dry, rigid earth as the bunker diggers toiled; a metal squeak streaking from the Other Tit as nut and bolt strained metal to fit tightly; the clunk of an axe late after the swing or the sweeping fall of a tree from the cutters on the northern edge of the clearing. In spite of the activity, the compound, the scene, seemed essentially peaceful; perhaps because work is a peaceful occupation, whatever you're building. I was reminded of the American West, of building a fort against the hostile land, of peaceful treaty Indians camped about the stockade walls; out-riders, wood-cutters, and scouts moving out and back across the parched grass hills. And over all this, controlling each contraction of muscle in this new land, the confident, foolish idea that because man piddles in the earth with pointed sticks, because he shits in holes and covers it like a serene tomcat, because he cuts trees and replants them where he wishes, that because of these things man shall inherit the earth. That we shall be masters, inheritors with the tried and true strength of our brown arms and calloused hands and with great boldness and strength, never fearing for a moment the violent winds which might cast us like chaff across the land; nor afraid that the land itself might buckle and rip beneath our very feet and suck us into its soft hot core; nor afraid, least of all, that the aborigines who came before us can stand against us, feathers and paint and leather shields no hope against a Sharpes or a Henry. It seems our only fear might be of those who come behind us, the wave pushing behind us just as the Huns and the Vandals pushed the Visigoths into the Romans and the Romans into the sea. But we know there are none behind us, know we are the last, the best and the last of the barbarians, the conquerors, the long knives, the jolly green giants of history who move at first across the land with fire and sword, then with transistor radios and toothpaste, seeking not even greener grass, nor even movement itself, but merely senseless turds in the large bowel of history…

But I stayed too long in the tower; I revealed my position to the enemy. As I climbed down, Morning looked up from where he dug in the ammo bunker, saying, "Looking for them pesky redskins, Sarge?"

"And the angel of the Lord shall sink his scythe into the great winepress of the earth," I said, "and bring peace to the heathen."

"Stop stealing my lines, Sarge," he said, raising the pick, then plunging it deep into the ground.

"Stop stealing mine," I said, walking away.

I collected the Armalite and two clips from my tent, hooked two fragmentation grenades on my combat harness, and then walked down to where the log detail was stripping limbs from the felled trees. I watched, chatted with the guards, and had the second cigarette of the morning. The forest, though not as thick as it had looked from the compound, blocked out the sun fifty feet inside, so the men had cut their logs at the very edge. After splitting them, they cut them into five-foot lengths and, two men to a log, started carrying them back toward the compound along a trail beaten through the hip-high elephant-grass by previous details. I followed, last man behind one of the new guys, a kid from southern Ohio who hated the Army with remarkable passion because the dentists had pulled all his teeth during Basic. He thought nineteen premature for false teeth, and he let the world know it, bitching a while, then clacking his choppers, then bitching again. His buddy in front told him that the girls back in the ZI would just love it if he took out his plates and gummed their titties. Like all Army discussions, politics, religion, war, or false teeth, this one moved quickly to the terminal point of all of them: fucking. The kid laughed, only partly convinced, but in a way that promised he would try it with the first girl who showed him a bare breast.

I was still chuckling when the sniper shot. Before my mind recorded the sound of the rifle behind me or the snap as the round whipped past my ear, a hole magically winked two inches to the right of the base of his spine, blood and dust clouded before him, and his legs buckled. But even as my mind wasn't recording, it was working. I dove and rolled into the high grass at the right of the trail. Another shot skimmed the grass tops up the slope, and the ricochet scattered chickens and children in the outer compound.

"Stay down!" I shouted, but everyone had already burrowed into the grass roots. The snipers held their fire now. Either cutting out or waiting without revealing their position, I thought. Two shots from different rifles: no automatic weapons. One shot down, one up: one man in a tree, one on the ground, and probably a third covering who hadn't fired yet. Thank God for the grass. The protection of the outer perimeter was two-fifty or three-hundred yards uphill. I had twenty-five men, counting myself, but only five weapons. "Smoke!" I shouted. "Holler it up!"

As the cry for smoke drifted back up the hidden line, I crawled as close to the trail as I could. The kid's body slowly stretched out, easily, carefully, as if he carried eggs on his back. Once flat, he lay as still as the dropped log, his hands out in front of his head. He began to moan, to whisper please, but the moan seemed almost conversational, detached as if he might be having a discussion with an ant crawling below him. A rivulet of blood, black in the dust, beaded red hanging on the trampled grass, crept sedately back down the trail.

"Hey," I whispered. "Roll over here. Roll over, kid."

Another face appeared between two clumps of grass on the other side of the path. It was the kid from the front of the log, and he was crawling out into the path.

"Stay put," I said, but he came on.

"Harvey," he said. "Harvey, you bastard, I told you to take the front, you fuck head, I told you, I told you."

"Stay put, soldier," I said. "Goddammit, stay put, and shut up."

"Digs, Digs," Harvey said calmly, "Digs, I think they done shot my balls off. I sure believe they did." As he talked, he sounded calmer, but his body shook in quick tremors.

"Oh, Harvey, goddamn you, Harvey," the other one said, reaching out along the ground for Harvey's hand. His thumb disappeared in a burst of dust, and while he was throwing himself back into the grass, three quick but spaced shots searched the grass around him. Harvey shook harder, as if by vibration he would sink into the earth.

"Roll over here," I told him again. "Please roll over."

"Sarge? Sarge, is that you?" he muttered into the ground. "Sarge, can you find my teeth. I lost my teeth."

His buddy appeared once more at the edge of the path, closer to the ground this time, holding out his hand so I could see the thumb missing above the second joint. "Sarge, they shot my thumb off. My fucking thumb, right off. What can I do, huh, Sarge?"

"You bastards, shut up or I'll shoot your heads off. Shut up."

I slipped the Armalite on automatic fire, threw a long burst downslope, then leaped across the trail. I landed on Harvey's teeth, laughed, kicked the other kid away from the edge, and as he rolled one way, I went the other. The sniper followed me, rounds stinging my face with dirt, burning at me as I rolled and crawled, until I thought that the automatic fire I heard was directed at me. The rolling and crawling went on after the sniper stopped firing, and when I stopped, my hands, with their own will and concern, flew about my body seeking wounds, blood, bone, gristle, searching until they found me intact, then nodding yes to my stupid face as the first of the smoke rounds dropped twenty yards downslope.

I went back to the two wounded, wrapped the bleeding hand and stuffed a T-shirt into the bleeding crotch, and sent them back through the lovely smoke with two men to help each. I screamed at them to tell Tetrick to give me mortar and automatic fire at random intervals; made them scream it back with angry faces at me. The two M-60s had stopped ranging and were beginning to traverse in short bursts cutting up the edge of the woods. I crossed the trail again, waited for more smoke and rifle fire, then shouted for the men to go.

The two VC rifles opened up, one right and high, the other left and low on the ground, two rounds apiece, my rational mind confirming what my instinct had already known, and I might have spotted the snipers but for some low rounds from behind me that sent me to earth again. The smoke, thick now, and the M-60s coming in hard at the edge of the trees kept the snipers down while the men moved uphill.

I slipped back into the thickest smoke, then ran back to my left, jumped the path again, the log and the bloody mark, then crawled another twenty-five yards to a brush-choked depression which ran down from the saddle between our two hills. Brush we had meant to clear the next day. The slight dip offered cover only because of thick growth, but the dip quickly became a dry wash as I moved downhill, and the brush was too tangled to move through. But at the bottom, just like the mesquite and cat-claw thick arroyos back home, I found eighteen inches of clear space under the growth, and I crawled down that until the smoke rounds and the covering fire ceased. I assumed that the men had make it back, so I waited for them to give my instructions to Tetrick.

I caught my breath in the pause, dropped the web belt with canteen and first-aid pack, changed clips, had a quick drink, then poured some water on the wash bottom and scrubbed the mud on my face, ears, neck, and hands, and waited. I assumed patience, in this case, to be a major virtue.

When the fire started again, I moved down the wash with the bursts and the echoes following mortar rounds, looking. The wash turned to the left, then sharply back to the right, as I had remembered, and I moved down it on my belly, looking. If the two men had been deer instead of men, and this happening in a South Texas arroyo in the afternoon heat, one slow step then a long look and watch your shadow and don't turn your head quickly, I would have seen the men much sooner. But they were men with guns, not deer, and I was belly-flopped under the brush, each breath raising tiny dust-devils below my chin, and they were men with guns, hunting too, and not deer.

You don't look for bedded deer, but for an ear, a horn, a folded leg, a black nose, or a quick eye turning to see you. When my father taught me to still-hunt, he wouldn't let me shoot until I saw the buck before he did. He would stop, try to show me while I blinked and tried to see a whitetail where there were only gray shadows, then let the buck go. It's like those funny pictures that have a cow or a face hidden among blurred lines and shadows: once you see it, you wonder how you ever missed it. I shot my first buck through the neck where he lay, and he never got up. But I had never looked for men. This was a different game, but I always was a fast learner.

At the bottom of the slope, thirty yards from the trees, the wash broadened into a small sandy flat. I crept into the shadow of a bush and against a ten-inch bank, and lay on my back, feet downhill. Patience again. Let them make the first move to escape. Tetrick would send a patrol soon, and they would have to move. But while waiting, I saw them: the guy in the tree, easy, a foot, small, brown and dirty in a clump of leaves. The leaves moved in the wind, the foot didn't; fifty yards directly to my right. The one on the ground was harder, but after locating the one high, I knew just about where to look for the lower one. The grimy cloth wrapped around his head to keep sweat out of his eyes drooped a gray tag where it was knotted; I found that, then the dark eye beside it. The clump of brush where he sat, his legs crossed, was about thirty yards out from the trees and twenty yards left and above me. Two of them, one of me. They would kill two men on the patrol, then vanish into the thick forest. There should have been a third to cover the other two, but cockiness is not just an American fault.

During an automatic burst from above, I slipped a grenade from my harness, straightened the pin and pulled it. In the next mortar explosion, I flipped the Armalite from auto to single fire, and in the next explosion, I released the handle, waited, then threw the grenade in a high arc toward the clump of bushes, firing two quick rounds along the ground toward the VC while the grenade was in the air. On my side before the explosion, I laid four carefully aimed rounds two feet above the hanging foot. His single round was faster, but wide to the left and high, but mine were like axe blows in his chest, and bounced him off the tree trunk. He flipped out of the tree like a Hollywood stunt man.

The grenade had exploded and the bits of shrapnel sung past while I was turned. I rolled, then fired toward the bushes, twice, but there was no answer. The grenade had cut the brush in front of him, and he lay on his back, his rifle blown away from him. I ran to him, circling to the left, but there was no need for the caution. The grenade must have caught him as he tried to stand and to duck my two rounds at the same time. The left leg was completely severed at the hip, the genitalia, a bloody stump, and the stomach wall split from hip to navel. The black pajamas had been blow off, and he was naked in his death. Warm gray intestines looped out of his torn belly, loops furrowed with gashes dripping decomposed rice. The stink sputtering out as the guts kept contracting as if the business of life went on as usual. The eyes turned back as I walked up, and the breath came as fast as the flutter of a bird's wing. I shot him in the ear, then went to check the other.

He was dead, four bruise-ringed pin holes in a line up the chest; almost no blood in front; almost no flesh in back. An old rifle with wire holding the broken stock together lay beside the body. I shot him in the ear, then walked back up the slope to meet Tetrick and ten men coming at a dead flatfooted run.

(I know you'd rather hear about the fear, about my lungs seeming to lunge up my throat after air, about the infinitesimal but now eternal tremor clutching my hands, or about the dizzy reels of my brain, or the watery shit running down my leg. But you know that part by heart now. I did what I did. Two men died, two others lived, perhaps. It's not supposed to make sense. Fear and trembling is no excuse; action is no reason; dead is dead.)

"You shoulda let them go," Tetrick huffed as he arrived, grease gun swinging and fear in his face. "But you did good, kid."

"Yeah," I said, "Fine. How are the wounded?"

"Should be okay. Med-evac chopper's coming quick." He pointed over the hill where a black dot buzzed closer.

"Fine," I said again, then walked on up the hill, the men behind me carrying the two bodies.

They laid the bodies in front of the spotting tower, and everyone had to come see them, to gape at the guts hanging out of the one like an atrophied papier-mâché leg, to slap me on the shoulder, to point out my brilliant shooting. It wasn't unlike a successful hunt, back in camp with the drunk card players who only hunted peace from their pinched-faced Texas wives, middle-aged men with fawning mouths and bitter, envious eyes, and hands that grasped at your youth.

"Cover them up," I said to Tetrick. "Jesus Christ, cover them up."

"Let 'em get used to it," he answered.

And Morning answered too from behind: "Too late to be sensitive now. Not much to send home to Mamma, huh?"

I walked to my tent and lay down and let the fear wash out of me. When Morning walked into my tent, the shaking had just began to get bad, violent, like a fever convulsion, and the legs of my cot were rattling against the plank floor. A shaft of white hot sunlight plunged through the open flap into the blackness of my tent, and Morning's face was black and his head outlined in fire-haze white.

"They say the first one does that to you. But you'll get used to it," he said as he stepped in.

I raged off the bunk without thought. One hand filled with his shirt, the other with the bayonet off my boot, I shoved him back toward the door, tripped him, then kneeled on his chest, the bayonet against his throat.

"You keep your mouth shut now. You let me alone now. I liked killing those stinking little animals. I pretended they were you and all your stupid bleeding heart kind." I screamed, spittle flaying at his face like the dust motes suspended in the brilliant stab of sunlight. I lifted him off the floor, then shoved him out of the tent, followed him, pushed him again. He fell, rose angry, and started to come, but I had the bayonet low against my hip, and he stopped.

"You gutless mother-fucker," he said. "You got guts enough to drop that nigger blade, I'll bust your head for you."

"When it happens, son," I said, "You're going to die. But I want you to kill first. I want things to be even; then there can be hair and brains all over the place, then, yours."

He stepped back, his face twisted as if I'd hurt him. "No worry about that," he muttered. "No worry." He turned and wandered off, shaking his head, saying to Novotny, who had run up with some others, "What's with him?"

Though the question hadn't been meant to be answered, Novotny said, "Fuck with the bull, Morning, you get the horn."

I walked back in the tent. Morning's cigarettes were scattered across the muddy floor. He'd come to offer me one, yes, and his hand too, and his face had been twisted in pain as he walked away. Joe, Joe, you can't push and pull and fan around with life, then just say quits when you get ready. I hadn't given him time to say "sorry" and now he wouldn't listen to mine. Hard-headed bastard. I would have killed him now, if he had come back to the tent. The game was over between us. Shit, shit, shit. I lay down in the darkness, alone now, calm, resigned, anger gone, fear gone. I slept.

Then came the idiot Lt. Dottlinger fast on the wings of a jet. The first, cracking over the compound like thunder, rolled me out of the bunk without waking me fully. Outside, still dazed, the second drove me to the ground where the rest of the men already were, including the third casualty of the day, the guard from the tower who had jumped and broken a leg when the first jet came over. Just as I stood up, asking "What the hell?" the first came again too fast to be real, wing cannons hammering at the earth, explosions of dust through the grass. The jungle never acknowledged any hits; the rounds might as well have never been fired. Then the second jet was back, firing in the same senseless way. Then the first again, laying napalm eggs at the edge of the trees, then the second, then both in a quick pass and dive at the hilltop, a waggle of wings and two brown faces and white smiles, and zip the South Vietnamese Air Force was gone, leaving behind one American casualty and one hell of a grass fire and one Lt. Dottlinger running out of the CP Bunker, shouting, "That'll teach the commie little bastards. That'll teach them."

Capt. Saunders was heard to mutter, "Three weeks, you dumb son of a bitch." Three weeks being the time left until the promotion list came out with Dottlinger passed over a third time and reduced to S/Sgt and transferred to another outfit. "Three weeks."

The grass burned from the outer perimeter to the edge of the jungle trees, and the jungle itself might have burned except that it was still too green from the rains which had plagued our first week in Vietnam. When we tried to fight the fire with wet blankets, we lost two more men to smoke inhalation, so we could do nothing but stand and choke on smoke and grassy cinders and try to keep the tents from burning for four hours until the fire burned itself down and away toward the rolling hills below us, smoke plumes above it like the banners of a victorious army moving on to other, more significant engagements.

That night sparks winked all around us, and the canvas of our tents, soaked with water and smoke, seemed to breathe the heat directly at us. Most of the troops spent the night out of their tents, and there was much talking and laughter about the day. But I went where I could be almost alone, the cot in the guard section of the CP Bunker, underground, sitting with the sleeping supernumerary, the silent radioman, the humming tubes, the small lights, and myself.

You might wonder that I, experientially green as I was, could take on two men belonging to perhaps the best insurgent guerrilla force in the world, take them on, kill them, and walk away physically untouched. You might wonder, but I don't. The deer I killed, the first one I told you about: I was nine. Deer are easier than men, but not easy. They hear with their feet and have eyes evolved for catching motion and noses bred for smelling the enemy. I was already a hunter; I only needed to find my game.

I know that hunting is out now, and all that, and I will be the first to admit that I never hunted out of a need for food nor, I hope, for sport, nor for the blood since that warm sticky smell has always slightly sickened me, but for the ritual, the remembering of the time when men needed to be both smart and strong, crafty and swift and silent of foot, the remembering. And I remembered well, and I was good…

All the things pressing…

Remember: I came from a working ranch, grew up digging fence post holes, driving a tractor, herding cattle more often with a Jeep than a horse but sometimes with a horse, riding in pickups with a rifle and shotgun racked behind me and a.38 in the glove box, cutting cattle and a few hogs while they protested the loss of their maleness. Remember I won my first fist fight when a kid laughed at the book of fairy tales I was reading on the school bus home, and I won a few and lost a few after that but never quit, and the first time I put on football equipment it felt right, and I did it well, and my high school time was spent learning to maim, to make the other guy quit, and I did it well, but other things too. Remember: I went away to be a college professor after Korea, to be educated, and in the process educated the girl down the road and lost her. I had killed and fought and drunk in Mexican whorehouses, but to those who would say – then, not now – to me, "beast, monster, killer," I would answer, "See my degrees, examine my transcripts, my As and Bs." And to those who would accuse "intellectual," I could point to my trophies, the bear-skin rug from a honeymoon trip to Canada, the elk head and rack so large my father had to knock down a wall to put it in the living room across from the wall of books above the Krummel Journal when I shipped it from Washington. And if that wasn't enough, I could show them the back of my hand with their blood on it. But that is the past past; for now I can say nothing. That's not to say I've learned nothing, but that I know little.

Don't be surprised that I had a troubled youth. I learned about masks long before Joe Morning.

But there are other things: Gut a bear, slice the thick belly skin with a keen knife, ease the blade through the membrane, cut around the anus and the genitals, split the diaphragm, reach up the chest cavity, grasp the esophagus and the larynx, cut them through, then pull from the top, pull the guts out with your hand, the pink lungs, the muscular heart smashed by a mushrooming lead-nosed bullet, the still-moving intestines, wash the clotted black blood off the ribs with an old cloth. But don't stop there, skin the manlike carcass hanging from a barn rafter, pepper him to keep the flies away, let it cool as the weather decrees, then butcher, slice the flesh, saw the bones, and wrap the meat in freezer paper, eat the backstrap chicken-fried and roast the forelegs and smoke the rear, and eat your bear, knowing as you chew, as you digest, his mortality is yours, and this is what he would do to you, though with more animal reason and less waste, and even then what you've learned is only the beginning. It is not as simple as this, not at all, but this is a beginning.

If politicians, revolutionaries, reformers, preachers and priests, generals, Gold Star Mothers and the Daughters of the American Revolution, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Sons of the Republic, if they had to field dress and butcher and eat all the useless dead they contract with warriors to produce, then… God, how the beef market would fall.

You will excuse the digression. Looking back, it seems I'm saying that I butcher game with more love and understanding than I have when I butcher men. Don't believe it. But don't pity me, either. I may be down but I ain't dead.

You will excuse the digression. As I told you, the smell of blood makes me slightly sick.

The rest of that week and the next were tense but busy. The antenna field was finished then mined, and that night two VC were killed trying to cut the cables. The bunkers were roofed with logs and sandbagged, and small concrete ammo bunkers were built into the sides of the mortar pits. An arrangement of pits and earthen walls protected all but the top half of the radio vans and the roofs were sandbagged against mortars. The generators and gasoline came, and a field kitchen too with cooks, stoves, and hot meals. The troops began to feel at home. They were brown and healthy, the last drop of San Miquel had been sweated out, and those who didn't have cat fever looked as if they could go hunting bears with a willow switch, between trips to the latrine, that is. The Det had already dug eight and filled six latrines, and used enough toilet paper to raise wood pulp stocks 3 8/10 points on the big board.

On the morning before we were to begin operations at 1600 the next day, a Caribou chopper appeared filled with tons of warm beer. Saunders had saved our beer rations for one big bust. Everyone in the Det, except me, spent the whole day drinking warm Schlitz, puking, and getting totally wiped. I broke up seven different fights, none of which drew a bit of blood from either fighter, and pulled at least twenty men out of tangles with the wire, which drew a great deal of blood. They went on after sundown, as long as they could keep enough beer down to keep their buzz up, and I spent the night poking Benzedrine down sick, sleepy guards, praying they didn't shoot each other, worried until I finally took the live rounds away from them, deciding that if the VC came this night we could hold them off just as well with empty beer cans. Once, on my rounds, I heard Saunders and Morning in one of the latrines talking about their football past, recounting every single football game they played in, saw, or even heard about. They really pissed me off. Who was I that I shouldn't be drunk? Why was I always responsible? I stormed the latrine, shouted to Saunders that he could take care of his own god-damned Det because I was going to rack out, by God. As I walked away, I heard him say to Morning, "That Krummel is sure a mean drunk, huh?" The bastard, I thought, but I had to smile. And the next morning at 0600, he was up, showered, shaved, and handing me a fifth of Dewar's, and the young men were up, out of their tents, as ready as they were ever going to be for what was to come. I had two pulls on the bottle, and when I lay down on my bunk, I was as peaceful as I had ever been.

At 1600 that afternoon, I mounted the night guard, Trick One climbed into the vans for the first swing trick, and the 721st Det was back in operation. At 0315, approximately, the first mortar round fell in the outer circle among the sleeping militia troops, a woman began screaming, the attack started, and the 721st went out of operation.

At almost the same moment as the first mortar explosion, two Bangalore torpedoes blew the inner and outer wire, one at the east gate of the outer circle, the other to the side of the M-60 bunker at the eastern point of the inner triangle. The inner wire had been blown by VC members and sympathizers among the provincial militia, about thirty of them. The mortar rounds kept coming in, walking across the compound, and a quick flurry of small-arms fire and three or four automatic weapons lashed at the hill from the edge of the clearing, east and north. The M-60s answered quickly, but the one at the eastern point just as quickly stopped as it was overrun.

I had been checking the guard at the western inner gate, and as I ran back to the CP Bunker, circling around the mess tent, a fragmentation round landed ten feet to my right. The concussion lifted then casually tossed me through the back door of the mess tent. As I tumbled, I thought only one thing: Jesus, not so soon. I fell among pots and pans and the sleeping mess cook, but I couldn't hear the noise. I got up, kicked pots one way, the cook the other, and ran back outside, and I couldn't hear the sound of my laughter. The ringing in my ears was pleasure compared to the storm of noise assaulting them when the ringing stopped. I seemed intact, though, but my shirt had disappeared. I ran on without it.

Men milled everywhere, like cattle in a lightning storm, two and three men throwing themselves at one slit trench, men slitting the sides of burning squad tents to get their footlockers out, men running still clutched in mosquito netting, and mortars falling steadily now, throwing men in long looping dives along the ground. Rifle rounds snapped past, usually overhead, but an occasional red explosion or black hole stung among us; sparks trailed above our mortar pits, now, answering, and the rifle fire slowed. I hit and pushed my way through the flying naked arms and legs, screaming Alert Positions! but it seemed that no one heard me, no one felt my blows, not one returned them. I stopped by my tent for the shotgun and two bandoliers of ammo, slung them, then ran for the CP Bunker. Fifteen feet from the bunker, our M-60 began to wink at me from the mortar pit behind the eastern emplacement. I dove and rolled into the communication trench, falling among five or six crouched troops holding smoke grenades. I shook them, shouted at them, then kicked them, but they refused to move. I threw the grenades for them, so we had a bit of smoke cover about thirty-five yards out, and the M-60 slowed its rate of fire. As I turned to go back to the CP, the troops were beginning to throw grenades on their own, smoke and fragmentation, but they were mostly short, and the M-60 began to answer with waspish vehemence. Two troops were hit with a single burst directly in front of me. One's right arm came back mangled from a throw, forearm hanging at an oblique angle; another's brains and bits of skull rained upon my back. I threw the dead one out of the trench before he stopped kicking, and dragged the other to the CP. An aid station had been set up in the guard section, so I left him with the white-faced medic.

Saunders, wearing fatigues he had obviously slept in, was on the other side, screaming on the wire to the mortar pits, "Illumination, goddammit! Illumination! Alternate! Illumination!" Then he would shout at the guard in the spotting tower to get off his ass and direct fire, goddammit. Tetrick ran in behind me, dressed in underwear and combat boots. He rubbed the side of my face, my shoulder, and my ribs, then drew back a bloody hand.

"Just scrapes," he said. "You're all right."

I had been, as long as I didn't know I was bleeding, but the sight of his red hand hit me behind the knees, and they shook so badly, I staggered as I followed Tetrick over to Saunders.

"Get some men in the com trench," Saunders said. "Need cover so the men in the vans can get over here."

"Already done," Tetrick said. "I got Barnes and Garcia kicking 'em outta the slit trenches," he continued, but Saunders was listening to the phones.

"Coming down the trenches. Both sides," he yelled. "Stop them. Spotter says demo teams."

Tetrick waved me toward the right, then pushed me as he went to the left. Behind us, Saunders screamed for illumination, the radioman screamed for a flare ship and an air strike, and the wounded screamed for mercy. Saunders was getting some illumination, but no one else got anything.

In the trench, by the pale ghostly light from drifting flares, I could see men leaping and running out of the vans, trying to get to the trench. My old Trick had been working mids. Cagle and Novotny flew directly at me, but a mortar explosion threw Cagle ten feet to the right. He landed still running, but now as if he were being pushed from behind, three or four quick shoves, and bursts of black blood exploding across his chest, and I knew he must be dead, but I didn't think about it. Novotny slid into the trench like a man stealing second, his rifle held high, but I grabbed him before he hit bottom, jerked him down the trench behind me, then up to the wall around the nearest van where we crouched, trembling, mouths sucking for air, until three VC in jockstraps carrying satchel charges crept down the trench below us. As they passed us, I elbowed Novotny, set the Armalite down in favor of the shotgun, then stepped behind. Three quick rounds of 00 buckshot smashed them to the ground. Two more, directed at the two that still had heads, saved me the trouble of checking them out. When I turned, Novotny still sat there, looking up at me like a whipped pup. With a double handful of fatigue jacket, I pulled him to the trench.

"Shoot, you bastard, shoot."

He fired a tentative round into the trench. I slapped him. He turned, angry, then back, and he fired into the bodies until I slapped him again. He followed when I turned and ran, leaped the trench, and rolled over the protective wall into the mortar pit.

Novotny fell directly on top of me, and what little wind I had left fled into the stream of incredible noise wailing about my head. Vaguely, I wondered if he had broken any of my ribs. It felt as if the right ribs were sticking into my lung, and when I vomited up my supper, I ran my fingers through it to see if there was any blood. I didn't find any. I wasn't quite tired enough yet to sleep in my own vomit, so I got to hands and knees, and as I did, the sergeant in charge of the mortar pit stepped on my hand. I stood up quickly, knocking him down.

"Get off my fucking hand," I screamed.

"Get out of my fucking pit," he shouted.

"I'm trying to get some cover for your fucking pit."

"Well, do it. Don't stand there with your finger up your ass." Sick, tired, bloody, surely dying, I tugged Novotny along behind me among the burning squad tents, shaking kids out of their holes. Somehow, no, not somehow, but with punches, kicks, and horrible threats, we wrestled ten frightened kids to their rifles and to the protective wall in front of the mortar pit, stood them there with a boot in their butts each time they tried to sit, and made them fire down the trench. We would have had eleven, but I hit one recalcitrant too hard, and left him unconscious in his slit trench. He took a direct hit from a mortar as I herded my group away. One of the herd accused me of murder until I threatened to murder him. But I got ten of them there, and left Novotny in charge.

I went back down the trench to the CP, down and over bodies of the dead and the frightened. The smoke cover was gone, and the burning squad tents made lovely silhouettes of their heads. The automatic fire from the M-60 came at them like a plague of locusts, and they lay in their holes, those alive, firing into the night air. Popping up once, I saw a VC with dynamite grenades blowing the radio vans. Those who hadn't made it back already, wouldn't now. I threw five or six rounds at the VC, but he ducked behind a van, so I moved on to the CP.

Things seemed more ordered there. The air strike and the flare ship were on their merry way, the Vietnamese troops had rallied and sealed their perimeter with heavy and heroic losses, but the Vietcong had breached the western gate again, and would have poured in but for our 81mm mortars, which kept them from massing for a charge. The fire from the edge of the trees and the VC mortars slackened, probably because of a lack of ammo. All we had to do was hold what we had, but there were many VC still in the perimeter contesting what ground we were holding.

"But we have to have that machine gun," Saunders said to me as Tetrick handed me three phosphorus grenades.

"You're both out of your fucking minds," I said, trying to hand the grenades back to Tetrick.

Before either could answer, Lt. Dottlinger stood up in the corner where he had been sitting, saying, "See here, Krummel, that's an order, and you damn well better obey." He had taken time to dress in clean starched fatigues before coming to the CP, and he had walked through the fire like a mad general, and tried to talk to Saunders about leading a charge, but Saunders made him sit in the corner. He was very chipper and clean, but only willing to lead a charge or sit in the corner. Saunders looked as if he had just come off a three-day drunk; Tetrick looked like a dirty old man in his underwear and a dressing around his bald head where a ricochet had peeled a patch of scalp away; surely I resembled death warmed over.

"If he opens his mouth again," Saunders said to me, "kill him. And that is an order." Dottlinger sank back to his corner. "That machine gun is hurting us, Krummel. Take as many men as you want. I'll get you some smoke."

"Get me a fucking tank, will you? Sure. Shit, yes, old crazy Krummel will." I put the Armalite and the shotgun down and walked out of the CP. A burst hit the metal legs of the spotting tower as I stepped out, and lead buzzed about me, plucked at my pants, but missed. Or maybe bounced off. I don't know; I just kept walking.

I arranged with Novotny for some covering fire over the trench, then I slipped into it, hoping they wouldn't shoot me, crawling, cursing under my breath, though no one could have possibly heard me if I had cursed aloud, crawling years just to reach the three bodies of the VC demo men, scrambling months over their slick naked back as noise and light pounded at my head, clubbing my ears, abrading my eyes, pounding, incoming, outgoing, mortars trailing sparks up the sky, flares like flash bulbs hanging fire, fires leaping wild behind me, tracers splitting, screaming the dark shadows above, and as I crept past the latrine, burning canvas fluttered into the earth with me, slow, turning like a red-gold autumn leaf, peaceful. My mind, my body said the attack had already lasted out time itself, but my watch lied in less than an hour. I threw it away, then myself as rounds from the covering fire laced the sides of the trench, scattering dirt and solid fright against my face. Head on bloody arm, I slept, no more than an instant, but surely sleep, for I dreamed of an old hawk-faced maiden aunt of my father's who told him that Americans were bad soldiers because they were afraid. Afraid not of dying, but of getting dirty, and they died because they wouldn't crawl on their bellies, not pride but cleanliness next to godliness, and then I squirmed on under the fire, belly, boots, and chin trailing wakes in the filth under me, and I lived.

By the second van from the end, I pulled the pin, released the handle, then lofted the grenade toward the mortar pit and machine gun. The second I held longer, and the third burst in the air over the compound like a fourth of July nightmare. I couldn't smell the flesh burning, nor the screams of the burned, but the M-60 died with a rattling coughing burst.

A head popped over the protective wall up by the first van, stayed long enough to see me, then disappeared. I crawled forward, then ran in a crouch, and when he rolled over the wall into the trench, I was behind him, thrusting back the slide of the.45. He heard, turned, I fired twice, once wide, the second round into the action of his rifle. His hand jerked away from the butt, but he flipped the rifle and ran at me, screaming, mouth a black cavern in his head, his weapon raised above his head like a sword. I fired again. His left leg flew behind him as if attached to a rope, but even as he fell, he kept crawling. I shot him in the hip and shoulder, and he stopped. I thought that enough (noise, not compassion), so I tried to run past him, but his good hand grabbed my ankle with a grip like a bear trap. I jerked, fired twice at his head, missed, then twice into his back. He grunted, but held. I kicked, tripped, sat heavily on his back. He grunted, but held again. The muzzle blast of my last round, fired directly against his flesh, kicked the.45 out of my hand, but he held what he had, and he had the most frightened man in the world. I sunk the bayonet into the back of his neck. He released my ankle, but the damned bayonet wouldn't come out of his neck. Idiot-like, I jerked at the handle, ran away, came back, jerked again, then ran again as two more heads peeped over the wall. A grenade exploded in the trench one curve behind me, but the concussion only gave me speed, and in less than a moment, I stood in the CP, shouting, "Shit, yes. Fuck yes. Damn right!" at Saunders and Tetrick. They merely nodded, then told me to get as many men in the communication trench as I could find.

The VC commander had about sixty men inside the perimeter, pinched off once more by the militia. He couldn't go back, and probably never thought of retreating, but if he could take the inner triangle, he wouldn't have to. He moved his men out of our wire and behind the vans on the right and the generators and repair shack on the left. The flare ship and the air strike had arrived, and the fire from the trees had nearly stopped, so the M-60s at the north- and south-east points could cover the outside trenches, which meant that the VC had to come right up the middle without even the covering fire of the captured M-60. We had tried to set up another M-60 in the center of the com trench, but three suicide grenadiers had put it out of action. We would either hold with the thirty or so men in the trench who would stand and fire, or we wouldn't hold at all. We had the firepower, but they had the guts.

I went for Novotny and his detail, but found them huddled against the wall, four dead, six wounded, and Novotny hung over the wall, a gutter wound laced black up the side of his head. The sergeant who had stepped on my hand said, "Dead. Direct hit." His left ear was gone and that side of his head covered with blood, but he seemed intact. I herded the mobile members of Novotny's detail into the trench thinking of nothing but staying alive. I didn't even care.

I set up to the right of the CP, the Armalite and the shotgun ready. The VC had fair cover now, Chinese grenades – more bark than bite – coming from behind the nearer generators, some men firing from behind the sandbags on top of the further vans. But we had grenades going out too, the 81mm mortars were beginning to walk in from the outer perimeter west gate. They had to come now.

Twenty or so men spilled out into the open from either side, some crawling, some charging, some kneeling for covering fire. Black pajamas and Jesus-boots flapping, the little men came like hounds of hell, like a forest fire, a crown fire leaping from tree to tree in a mad race of destruction. Those of us who were going to fight were up now, saying at least that we weren't going to die in our holes. At least ten VC fell in the first burst from the trench, but others kept coming.

As they swept past the third van on the right, half a dozen grenades went off among them. They faltered and in that hesitation another ten fell, though not all hit, for they kept firing from their bellies, or tried to crawl to the shelter of the vans. Those left charging were cut down quickly.

I hit a bunch of three on the left at about fifteen yards with the shotgun; they washed into five more, and the mass was ripped apart. Then another one on the right at five yards as he killed the man next to me, then another out of the air as he leapt over the trench. That was the last of the charge. I traded the shotgun for the Armalite, then went down the right after those who had fled to the spare safety of the vans. One in the foot as he knelt, another in a shower of sparks as he poked head and rifle around a van, and a third in the back as he climbed into a van.

Then Joe Morning stepped out of the door of the third van, shot a kneeling man in the back of the head. Then he ran into the midst of them, firing from the hip like a hero, but he hit at least three more before he folded at the waist like a waiter giving a surly bow, folded, fell, lay still.

After Joe Morning, we mopped up. The VC were beat, but not a single one surrendered. It was over. Oh, the planes chased the VC through the jungle, and the troops stayed on full alert, but it was over.

We collected our wounded, leaving the dead to sleep until daylight. Casualties were high; the 721st ceased to be operational. So many dead, so many ways to die. The mortars had done the worst damage. Dottlinger was the only one I saw without a shrapnel wound of some sort. (I don't mean to imply that he stayed in the CP; he was up firing during the charge, after the charge, after it was over.) Haddad had a black hole in the very center of his bald head, but not another mark on him, the round disappearing as surely as if it had been fired into the sky, and it is buried with him. A nickel-sized piece of shrapnel had torn through Quinn's cheek – in one side and out the other with about fifteen teeth, but not his bad one – and when he was hit, he fell on a tent peg and lost an eye. Peterson had his heel shot or blown off, but other than that he was all right. Cagle, Novotny, Morning, Haddad, Franklin, dead. (Though you know, as I do, that I was mistaken. Cagle wasn't dead, but was on the back side of the aid station, and I didn't see him. He lost two ribs and his right arm, but they saved his lung after it had collapsed. Novotny wasn't dead either, but deaf now.) All the new members of the Trick were still in the vans, dead in the vans where they had stayed. It was over.

I was supposed to be checking the dead VC, but I wandered past Morning's body being dragged away (I knew he was dead), and into the van he had come out of. Eight jumbled positions, four bodies present and accounted for, three new guys whose names I didn't want to know, but the fourth was a VC, a small terribly old man sitting in the corner. He looked like the one with the dynamite grenades that I had missed, but I couldn't tell.

Suddenly I had to pee so badly that tears welled in my eyes. Holding my crotch, I ran out the side door, slipping in blood or coffee at the door, but not falling, then rushed to the still smoldering latrine. All the canvas had burned away and the wooden seat still smoked. I couldn't imagine why I had come to the open latrine to pee, and then I couldn't stop giggling. A paperback collection of Huxley essays and a flashlight also smoked on the seat. I peed on them. Goddamned Joe Morning caught in the can reading by flashlight while the VC shot the hell out of the place. Shit. But he'd fallen too… I finished, then wandered back to the van, feeling his loss, feeling the guilt creep in on tiny but sharp-clawed feet.

Lost, tired, afraid, I can't go on. I sit next to the old, the skinny old man, reach for a cigarette in a shirt I no longer wore, or, no, I had quit, hadn't I; I don't know. One of the dead new guys had some in his shirt. How can a new guy be dead? No, no. How can a dead guy be new? I take his package. He's quit smoking for his health. The old man doesn't want one for his health either. Smoking fouls his sense of smell, and he can smell an American five hundred yards away; Americans don't smell like the earth but stink to high heaven. I shove a butt in his mouth anyway. Universal peace offering between men of war, but it won't stay lit. any more.

"There you go, pops," I say. His short flat nose was all mangled and bloody, his eyes were silent as his voice. "No place to get shot, pops, right in the snoot. And in the chest too. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and one in the snoot for eight. Somebody had a grudge on you, old man. Say, what's an old fart like you doing mixed up in this shit, anyway?…

"Not telling, huh? Maybe you don't know either. By God, old Joe Morning knows. Knew. Generals, politicians, captains of industry want us here, he says. But you could have stayed in your rice paddy, and I could have stayed home. But you weren't meant to be a rice farmer, nor I a college man. We're here 'cause we're afraid, old man. Joe Morning didn't know shit. That's why he's dead. I don't know why you're dead, but that's why he is. He thought he knew. You ever meet him? Too bad, 'cause he's lying out there now, deader than shit, deader than shit…"

But now I slept, my left arm cradling the old man, and I let my dreams tell him all I knew about Joe Morning, all I knew.

I woke in faint light, blinking in the shadows as a shaft of bright air fell across the open door. There were voices outside, Tetrick, Saunders, Dottlinger, making a KIA and damage report, and a loud throbbing of choppers as they lifted out the last of the wounded. The three came in the door, and I started to get up, but Dottlinger shot me before I could stand. The old man's body had fallen across me and took two.30 carbine slugs for me, but one knocked my right arm back against the wall, and another slammed my right leg hard against the metal floor. Dottlinger saw, almost as he did it, who I was, and he dropped the carbine.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "You got the machine gun, Krummel; you'll get the distinguished… you know… cross… something… commissioned in the field… I didn't…"

Tetrick and Saunders stood on either side of him, fatigue tugging at their faces. Tetrick cried. Saunders turned and knocked Dottlinger back out the door with the clipboard in his hand.

Stunned, sleepy-drunk, but in no pain yet, I pushed the old man off me, and thought I would stand and salute. It seemed the perfect gesture, which is to say, what Joe Morning would have done, but as I shouted Attention! through the tears clogging my throat and tried to stand, the bone grated in my leg, and not the pain but the sound knocked me out with disgust…

… and I woke here in this bed, determined to tell someone the truth. All this leading up to the truth. But it has taken too long. I find myself trapped by my own confession. The scene, the moment of extreme truth, swept past without me, the keys of my old machine clacking like knitting needles, and I without blade to cut the thread.

Turn back, turn back, dear reader: "Then he ran into the midst of them, firing from the hip like a hero, but he hit at least three more before I swung my sights across his middle and blew out the base of his spine with three quick rounds, and he folded like a waiter giving a surly bow, folded, fell, lay still."

There it is. I killed Joe Morning. I shot Cock Robin. Rah, rah, rah.

But you already suspected that, didn't you? That's all right. The whole purpose of any confession is to make the confessor, the guilty party, feel better. One whispers his crimes into the ear of a priest, or shouts them at his friends, or lends them to paper. Murderers tend to think they are poets; how distressing to discover that they were poets all along. It wasn't guilt that made me hesitate to confess my murder of Joe Morning, but my vanity. I knew it would affect you if it seemed that I couldn't bring myself to confess. Nonsense. I cared more when I killed him on paper than I did when I killed him for real. I also thought about letting him live. I wanted to kill him for a reason, rather than on a whim. No such luck, you say, He's dead. Nonsense. He's not dead at all.

I've known for three days that the voice screaming down the hall belonged to my friendly enemy, Joseph Morning, but the momentum of the confession, once confided to paper, carried me on, leaving me in the rather absurd position of confessing to a murder that didn't take place, yet. Art deceives as well as History; Life imitates Art as often as Art does Life; History seems to have little connection to either one. I can't apologize for lying, for only an accident of timing kept my confession from being as true as I knew. Should I confess just intent, or should I admit only life-like confusion? Art, History, Life: traitorous knaves. Don't blame me; I'm just their foolish pawn chained to my machine.

That infinite number of monkeys somewhere out there pounding at their machines for an infinite time surely will re-create Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and me, but God knows if they'll ever finish writing the truth.

Please don't despair because it's not over at all.