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You’re told to write a “moral” story – definition supplied by someone else. You’ve got morals, but that’s bullshit according to some guy named John Gardner. You listen reluctantly because he wrote a book about it. Went on and on for 205 pages about it. “Art’s morality” is a process of discovery, he says. Apparently, the artist who starts with “doctrine” is fucked. Fifteen-dollar paperbacks don’t lie.
You’re told to write a “moral” story, but you’re set on liberating all the queers and making sure people don’t start wars. War messed up your dad’s life, so you’re trying to rewrite that part. It’s pointless, but it’s all you know. Well, you don’t know because war messed up your dad’s life, so he says nothing. Everything you know, you read on Wikipedia or Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” Just the one story. You read it three times – twice to learn, once to teach. Storytelling is complicated, your professor told you. So is war, you said to your students.
You wonder if Tim would have shot your dad, then wrote a story about the guilt. Maybe he wrote about your dad.
You begin.
You remember all those Saturday nights you spent watching TV in your living room. Dad always needed to be home by 9:00 PM so that he could wake up at dawn for no reason at all. He had a military circadian rhythm that could never shatter. So you watched 10 PM reruns of M.A.S.H. You remember they were always speaking calmly into mechanical boxes and sitting in tents reading cables. You remember the laugh track. You remember how everything and everybody was a shade of hunter green. You write everything as hot and green.
But, when the cables come and Charlie reads from the boxy, typewritten orders that we have to clear entire fields and villages, I head to a grove of trees not far from our camp site.
You write in first person because no one ever told you about what Vietnam looked like during the war, but you know a lot about feelings. The narrator is a he, unlike you. He’s an introvert, just like you. He’s scared shitless. He smokes to pass the time, just like your dad did in America. Don’t make him an asshole – remember, not doctrine, but discovery.
Someone could come at me anytime with some sawed-off Russian shotgun or a butcher’s knife, but there I can quietly take in a Lucky Strike and exhale a stream of smoke into the humid air. I like to watch it swirl and dissipate into sky. It’s the only part of me that seems to fit in harmoniously here.
He should have a gun, you guess. You held a gun once. You accidently found dad’s gun hidden on the top shelf of a bookcase. It was heavy. You were scared even though it looked like the kind of gun that could only kill one person at a time. In the haste of putting it down, you can’t remember the make or the model, but Wikipedia has a “Weapons of the Vietnam War” page. There are pictures of guns encased in glass for modern museumgoers. There are categorized lists of flamethrowers, machine guns, and grenade launchers. You’re overwhelmed at the options so you pick the M16. You’ve read about it in stories a couple of times before.
I take a piss after my smoke and I think about how I did this an hour ago. It can get up to 90 during the day and my fingers hold and unscrew my canister more often than gripping the ridges of my M16.
You don’t want to write him as an asshole, so you make him a nice kid from middle America. You imagine a father in a suit and a mother in an apron surrounded by appliances from repressed 50s films. He’s an anxious introvert so he probably can’t be the quarterback and town hero. Make him the kicker of the football team. Make him poetically succumb to a fate he did not choose. Make it as tragic as lyrically possible. Feel sorry for him.
Water goes in and out of me – my mouth is always dry, maybe from the climate, maybe from my nervous uncertainty. On good, boring days all I do is smoke, drink, piss and think whatever comes to mind. Sometimes I think about the time I missed a field goal in overtime during the city championship. A lot of the time, I think about how my dad is probably typing and update for me to slip in the mail and mom is washing dishes for the third time in the day. When I feel really lonely, I think of the day my birthday was printed on a slip of paper, shaken in a shoebox, and pulled out of a tall glass canister – left for me to celebrate here with all the other unlucky men who share my birthday.
But, he’s got to kill someone.
Today, I don’t have time to think about mom, Emily, my high school science teacher Mr. Jones, or all the people I may or may not have killed. Charlie gathered us this morning and told us about the enemies hiding in a village not far from where we are.
“Shouldn’t be too hard. An engage and destroy,” I heard him say as I scraped up the last bits of scrambled egg from my metal plate. Charlie folded up the piece of paper and stuck it in his back pocket. I swear, I saw it in slow motion. I’m not sure if it’s the weather, but everything feels and sounds like vapor here. I don’t remember what it’s like to hear things clearly anymore.
Write all the ‘Nam films you’ve ever seen: Apocalypse Now. The Deer Hunters. Full Metal Jacket. The drinking, the longing, pinup girls taped against fabric tents, the welcomed care packages of things you supposedly could not find in the jungles of ‘Nam.
“After the engage and destroy, we should go, we should go find some cheap Johnnie Walker,” Bobby says to me. He has my birthday, but was born in Ohio. He has a girlfriend named Meredith and talks about how big her tits are. Sometimes, he gets peanut butter shares it with me, usually because my mom sends me saltines.
I nod at his proposition because I like Bobby.
“Chase it with some beer,” I reply. Sounded like the right thing to say.
I triple tie the shoelaces of my boots and make sure my artillery belt is buckled tightly. I put a packet of cigarettes in the cargo pocket closest to my waist. I fall in line with Bobby and Charlie who laugh and pat each other’s lower backs. We walk and board one of the helicopters, shoving twelve men in as if it were a minivan heading to a football game. As we fly off, Bobby tells everyone about our plan to find some Johnnie Walker and I feel approving grunts around me. I wonder if mom has kept her promise and sent over a couple of Marvels and my yearbook. We land on a dirt road about a mile away from a hamlet of huts.
“Should be a piece of cake. Should be all be cleared out, except for the perps,” Charlie says patting the memo in his back pocket.
“Can’t we just flame throw the place and grab some Johnnie in five minutes,” the New York boy, jokes. Laughter erupts from the group. I get myself to laugh too.
You don’t want to imagine a scene of Vietnamese people being rounded up and murdered in groups. You don’t want to arrange bloodied bodies in ditches. You don’t want to envision women being raped, houses being burned, babies being shot at like military targets. Luckily, there was a class you took where you read reporting by Seymour Hersh. The class read it for craft, but you read it because of the My Lai Massacre. It’s a well-written piece of investigative journalism. The standard.
Hersh quoted an unidentified man in the St. Louis Dispatch on November 13, 1969: “’We were told to just clear the area. It was a typical combat assault formation. We came in hot, with a cover of artillery in front of us, came down the line and destroyed the village. “There are always some civilian casualties in a combat operation. [Lieutenant William Calley] isn’t guilty of murder.’”
“Got em,” says a voice. It’s Bobby’s and I almost wish he were getting another round of peanut butter in the mail.
The piece was accompanied by a photo you’ve seen before. A group of villagers rounded up and photographed moments before they’re murdered. There’s an old man, a young woman, a little girl who looks like her daughter, and an older woman standing at the forefront, spreading her arms as a shield.
You don’t want to do it, but good endings in fiction are surprising, yet inevitable.
“Clear them,” I hear Charlie says from behind me. It sounds about 50 feet away and is accompanied with the sound of gunshots.
“What the fuck are you waiting for,” comes from my distant left. I watch the woman’s anger become fear and then limp sadness. I am tired and feel as if I have run 10 miles.
You pull the trigger and you finished. But you don’t feel any closer to your dad or Tim O’Brien.
There’s an audible haze that begins to envelope me. I don’t know what is real and what is not. It’s orders from the top. Get it over with, we’ll go to town afterwards. They’re going to kill you if you don’t do this shit. Come on, retard. I’ve run out of clips. Take it for the team. Come home. I am snapped out from a shove of my back.