Born on the Fourth of July (18 page)

He went back to the big sandbagged bunker to see the major.

“That was a pretty rough night, sergeant,” the major said, looking up from the green plastic maps on his desk.

“Yes sir,” he said. “It was pretty bad.”

“Ran into a lot of them, didn't you?” the major said, almost smiling.

“Yes, we sure did. I mean they just sort of popped up on us and started firing.”

The major looked down at the maps again and frowned slightly. “What happened?” he said. “What happened out there?”

“Well, major, like I said, we were moving toward the village and we had just grabbed the woman.”

“The woman?” the major said.

“Yes, we had just grabbed the pregnant woman.”

“She was pregnant?”

“Well yes sir, but we didn't find out until later. We didn't even think she was a woman. She didn't have any chest major, she was flat like a board and we tied her hands behind her back. And there was a boy with her, maybe her small son. We tied his hands too.”

“And then?” said the major.

“And then,” he said, “we took them up on top of a big sand dune that was a few hundred yards from the village.”

“Didn't anybody see you?”

“Yeah,” he said. He could feel himself sort of relaxing now. “I think a couple of people in the village. They were going to get water or something. They saw us and one of them started running back to the village. The others just made believe they hadn't seen us at all. I knew they had but they made believe and kept walking back to the village. We set up a perimeter on top of the hill. We set it up so we could watch all around us and see if anyone was coming out of the village after the woman.”

“What time was this?” said the major.

“Well—” he looked carefully at his watch. “I think it was about four. It was starting to get dark and I told all the men to eat their rations. Then it became very dark and there were a few small lights in the village and then the shooting started to the left. It was maybe a hundred meters from the big sand dune and I ran to the woman and the kid. I knew she was a woman now and pregnant. Then men started running toward the ocean, away from the dune. Some of them were very frightened. I kept yelling for them to stay, but everyone sort of scattered. Then they all seemed to be running in a line toward a long trench near the ocean. Most of them got back.”

“Most of them?” said the major.

“Yeah,” he said, “they all got back in the trench except one.”

“Who was that?”

“That was corporal, he was the last to come back. And that was when it happened,” he said.

“What happened?” said the major.

“That was when the corporal was killed.”

The bald sergeant who worked for the major walked in just as he told the major the thing that had been rolling around in his head all night.

“What happened?” said the major.

The bald sergeant was putting some papers on the major's desk. He did that and walked out.

“There were a bunch of shots,” he said carefully. “Everybody was shooting, it was a bad firefight.” He paused. “It was pretty bad and then corporal was shot. He was shot and he fell down in front of us and a couple of the men ran out to get him. They pulled him back in. I think the others were still firing. The corpsman tried to help … the corporal was shot in the neck … The corpsman tried to help …”

It was becoming very difficult for him to talk now. “Major,” he said, “I think I might have … I think I might have killed the corporal.”

“I don't think so,” said the major quickly.

“It was very confusing. It was hard to tell what was happening.”

“Yes I know,” said the major. “Sometimes it gets very hard out there. I was out a couple of weeks ago and sometimes it's very hard to tell what's happening.”

He stared down at the floor of the bunker until he could make himself say it again. He wasn't quite sure the major had heard him the first time.

“But I just want you to know, major, I think I was the one who killed him. I think it might have been me.”

There, he had said it. And now he was walking away.

For some reason he was feeling a lot better. He had told the major everything and the major hadn't believed it. It was like going to confession when he was a kid and the priest saying everything was okay. He walked by the men outside the radio shack. They turned their faces away as he passed. Let them talk, he thought. He was only human, he had made a mistake. The corporal was dead now and no one could bring him back.

The chaplain held a memorial service that afternoon for the man he had killed and he sat in the tent with the rest of the men. There was a wife and a kid, someone said. He tried to listen to the words the chaplain was saying, the name he kept repeating over and over again. Who was this man he'd just killed? Who had he been? He wanted to scream right there in the church tent, right there during the ceremony. He kept hearing the name too many times, the name of the dead man, the man with the friends, the man with the wife, the one he didn't know or care to know, the kid from Georgia who was now being carefully wrapped up in some plastic bag and sent back in a cheap wooden box to be buried in the earth at nineteen.

He had panicked with the rest of them that night and murdered his first man, but it wasn't the enemy, it wasn't the one they had all been taught and trained to kill, it wasn't the silhouette at the rifle range he had pumped holes in from five hundred yards, or the German soldiers with plastic machine guns in Sally's Woods. He'd never figured it would ever happen this way. It never did in the movies. There were always the good guys and the bad guys, the cowboys and the Indians. There was always the enemy and the good guys and each of them killed the other.

He went back to his tent after the ceremony was over and sat down. There was some mail but he couldn't get interested in it. Someone had sent him a Sergeant Rock comicbook. But it wasn't funny anymore. The good guys weren't supposed to kill the good guys.

The next few weeks passed in a slow way, much slower than any time in his whole life. Each day dragged by until the night, the soft soothing night, when he could close himself off from the pain, when he could forget the terrible thing for a few hours. Each night before he slept he prayed to his god, begging for some understanding of why the thing had happened, why he had been made into a murderer with one shot. Why him? he thought over and over again. He first pleaded with God, then he became angry, demanding. Oh God, he thought, why did this happen, for what reason? What kind of god, he thought, would do this to him? What kind of god would give him these terrible feelings and nightmares for what seemed to be the rest of his life?

The time passed in big gaps of deadness. Nights when he could sleep and forget and mornings when it all came back and the men stood by the tents looking at him in their peculiar way, whispering on the chow line. He found himself reading a small pocket Bible so he would not have to look at them and writing long letters to his mother and father. He wrote in his diary that he wanted to become a priest, and that was what he told his parents in the letter about the corporal that he finally wrote home. He told them the story he had told the major, the story about the firefight. And the whole thing in the letter took on a new and beautiful meaning. He had seen a man killed and something, something very deep and wonderful, had happened to him. In some wonderful way, he wrote to them, he had become something very different than he had ever been before. And now, he told them, he wanted to be a priest. He wanted to be like the guy up on the altar, the healer and the guy who gave communion.

He finished the letter and he sent it. There, he thought, it's through. And now deep down inside him he still felt the angry pain, but it became a little easier to live now, easier to live—even though the war was going on a little worse than before, artillery and rockets were hitting the camp almost every day, sending the men into the little bunkers they had built. The major was still sitting behind his desk in the big sandbagged battalion bunker, and whenever he walked past him the major would return his sharp salute with a very confident smile on his face. He thought of the major as his friend. He had understood the whole terrible thing. He had said that maybe it didn't happen, things got confusing out there, and the major said he knew, that he had been out there himself under heavy fire and he knew.

He knew the major understood everything, like the men who whispered softly on the chow line and the men who stood talking by their tents. No one wants to say, he thought, no one wants to talk about it. Who wanted to approach him and ask if he had done it, if he had killed the corporal that night? No one. No one would ever do it, he thought.

There was a night not long after he had killed the corporal when he was walking on the wooden path that snaked around all the tents past the bunkers like a sidewalk. He was sort of tiptoeing along the casings and he opened up what seemed to be his tent. He had seen this light in the long crack at the bottom of it and he walked in to find he had just walked into the battalion commander's tent. It was very dark, so dark somebody, anybody, could get lost in a place like that, he thought. Just like that goddamn patrol a few months ago when he had read the map wrong, when he had led the men in the wrong direction. He had been a thousand meters off. He was a mile from where he was supposed to be, and now he was doing it again. He was walking in on the goddamn battalion commander who was in his pajamas getting ready to go to bed or something.

“Yes, what do you want, sergeant?” he heard the battalion commander saying to him.

“Ahhh, nothing,” he said. “I made a mistake, sir. I thought this was my tent.”

The battalion commander looked at him for a moment, looked at him like he had done a very stupid thing. “Well, carry on,” he said.

It was his friend the major who gave him his second chance. He called him into the command bunker one day and told him he wanted him to become the leader of his new scout team. The major who understood him told him he liked the way he operated and said he knew the sergeant could do a good job.

Here was his chance, he thought, to make everything good again. This young, strong marine was getting a second crack at becoming a hero. He knew, he understood, the thing the major was doing for him, and he left the tent feeling stronger and better than he'd felt for a long time. Here was his chance, he thought over and over again.

He walked down the twisting ammo-box sidewalk and saluted one of the officers as smartly as ever, much too smartly for anyone who had been over there as long as him. The thoughts of the night he'd killed the corporal were already becoming faded as he began to think more and more about the scout team, how he would train them and the things they would do to make up for all the things that had come before.

He wrote in his diary that night how proud he was to have been made the leader of the scouts, to be serving America in this its most critical hour, just like President Kennedy had talked about. He might get killed, he wrote, but so had a lot of Americans who had fought for democracy. It was very important to be there putting his life on the line, to be going out on patrol and lying in the rain for Sparky the barber and God and the rest. He was proud. He was real proud of what he was doing. This, he thought, is what serving your country is supposed to be about.

H
E WENT OUT
on patrol with the others the night of the ambush at exactly eight o'clock, loading a round into the chamber of his weapon before he walked outside the tent and into the dark and rain. As usual he had made all the men put on camouflage from head to toe, made sure they had all blackened their faces, and attached twigs and branches to their arms and legs with rubber bands.

One by one the scouts moved slowly past the thick barbed wire and began to walk along the bank of the river, heading toward the graveyard where the ambush would be set up. They were moving north exactly as planned, a line of shadows tightly bunched in the rain. Sometimes it would stop raining and they would spread out somewhat more, but mostly they continued to bunch up together, as if they were afraid of losing their way.

There was a rice paddy on the edge of the graveyard. No one said a word as they walked through it and he thought he could hear voices from the village. He could smell the familiar smoke from the fires in the huts and he knew that the people who went out fishing each day must have come home. They were the people he watched every morning moving quietly in their small boats down toward the mouth of the river, heading out to the sea. Some of the older men reminded him of his father, going to work each morning and coming back home every night to sit by their fires with their children cooking their fish. They must talk about us sometimes, he thought. He wondered a lot what it was they thought about him and the men.

He remembered how difficult it had been when he had first come to the war to tell the villagers from the enemy and sometimes it had seemed easier to hate all of them, but he had always tried very hard not to. He wished he could be sure they understood that he and the men were there because they were trying to help all of them save their country from the Communists.

They were on a rice dike that bordered the graveyard. The voices from the huts nearby seemed quite loud. He looked up ahead to where the lieutenant who had come along with them that night was standing. The lieutenant had sent one of the men, Molina, on across the rice dikes almost to the edge of the village. The cold rain was still coming down very hard and the men behind him were standing like a line of statues waiting for the next command.

But now something was wrong up ahead. He could see Molina waving his hands excitedly trying to tell the lieutenant something. Stumbling over the dikes, almost crawling, Molina came back toward the lieutenant. He saw him whisper something in his ear. And now the lieutenant turned and looked at him. “Sergeant,” he said, “Molina and I are going to get a look up ahead. Stay here with the team.”