Born on the Fourth of July (19 page)

Balancing on the dike, he turned around slowly after the lieutenant had gone, motioning with his rifle for all of the men in back of him to get down. Each one, carefully, one after the other, squatted along the dike on one knee, waiting in the rain to move out again. They were all shivering from the cold.

They waited for what seemed a long time and then the lieutenant and Molina appeared suddenly through the darkness. He could tell from their faces that they had seen something. They had seen something up ahead, he was sure, and they were going to tell him what they had just seen. He stood up, too excited to stay kneeling down on the dike.

“What is it?” he cried.

“Be quiet,” whispered the lieutenant sharply, grabbing his arm, almost throwing him into the paddy. He began talking very quickly and much louder than he should have. “I think we found them. I think we found them,” he repeated, almost shouting.

He didn't know what the lieutenant meant. “What?” he said.

“The sappers, the sappers! Let's go!” The lieutenant was taking over now. He seemed very sure of himself, he was acting very confident. “Let's go, goddamn it!”

He clicked his rifle off safety and got his men up quickly, urging them forward, following the lieutenant and Molina toward the edge of the village. They ran through the paddy, splashing like a family of ducks. This time he hoped and prayed it would be the real enemy. He would be ready for them this time. Here was another chance, he thought. He was so excited he ran straight into the lieutenant, bouncing clumsily off his chest.

“I'm sorry, sir,” he said.

“Quiet! They're out there,” the lieutenant whispered to him, motioning to the rest of the men to get down on their hands and knees now. They crawled to the tree line, then along the back of the rice paddy through almost a foot of water, until the whole team lay in a long line pressed up against the dike, facing the village.

He saw a light, a fire he thought, flickering in the distance off to the right of the village, with little dark figures that seemed to be moving behind it. He could not tell how far away they were from there. It was very hard to tell distance in the dark.

The lieutenant moved next to him. “You see?” he whispered. “Look,” he said, very keyed up now. “They've got rifles. Can you see the rifles? Can you see them?” the lieutenant asked him.

He looked very hard through the rain.

“Can you see them?”

“Yes, I see them. I see them,” he said. He was very sure.

The lieutenant put his arm around him and whispered in his ear. “Tell them down at the end to give me an illumination. I want this whole place lit up like a fucking Christmas tree.”

Turning quickly to the man on his right, he told him what the lieutenant had said. He told him to pass the instructions all the way to the end of the line, where a flare would be fired just above the small fire near the village.

Lying there in the mud behind the dike, he stared at the fire that still flickered in the rain. He could still see the little figures moving back and forth against it like small shadows on a screen. He felt the whole line tense, then heard the WOOOORSHH of the flare cracking overhead in a tremendous ball of sputtering light turning night into day, arching over their heads toward the small fire that he now saw was burning inside an open hut.

Suddenly someone was firing from the end with his rifle, and now the whole line opened up, roaring their weapons like thunder, pulling their triggers again and again without even thinking, emptying everything they had into the hut in a tremendous stream of bright orange tracers that crisscrossed each other in the night.

The flare arched its last sputtering bits into the village and it became dark, and all he could see were the bright orange embers from the fire that had gone out.

And he could hear them.

There were voices screaming.

“What happened? Goddamn it, what happened?” yelled the lieutenant.

The voices were screaming from inside the hut.

“Who gave the order to fire? I wanna know who gave the order to fire.”

The lieutenant was standing up now, looking up and down the line of men still lying in the rain.

He found that he was shaking. It had all happened so quickly.

“We better get a killer team out there,” he heard Molina say.

“All right, all right. Sergeant,” the lieutenant said to him, “get out there with Molina and tell me how many we got.”

He got to his feet and quickly got five of the men together, leading them over the dike and through the water to the hut from where the screams were still coming. It was much closer than he had first thought. Now he could see very clearly the smoldering embers of the fire that had been blown out by the terrific blast of their rifles.

Molina turned the beam of his flashlight into the hut. “Oh God,” he said. “Oh Jesus Christ.” He started to cry. “We just shot up a bunch of kids!”

The floor of the small hut was covered with them, screaming and thrashing their arms back and forth, lying in pools of blood, crying wildly, screaming again and again. They were shot in the face, in the chest, in the legs, moaning and crying.

“Oh Jesus!” he cried.

He could hear the lieutenant shouting at them, wanting to know how many they had killed.

There was an old man in the corner with his head blown off from his eyes up, his brains hanging out of his head like jelly. He kept looking at the strange sight, he had never seen anything like it before. A small boy next to the old man was still alive, although he had been shot many times. He was crying softly, lying in a large pool of blood. His small foot had been shot almost completely off and seemed to be hanging by a thread.

“What's happening? What's going on up there?” The lieutenant was getting very impatient now.

Molina shouted for the lieutenant to come quickly. “You better get up here. There's a lot of wounded people up here.”

He heard a small girl moaning now. She was shot through the stomach and bleeding out of the rear end. All he could see now was blood everywhere and he heard their screams with his heart racing like it had never raced before. He felt crazy and weak as he stood there staring at them with the rest of the men, staring down onto the floor like it was a nightmare, like it was some kind of dream and it really wasn't happening.

And then he could no longer stand watching. They were people, he thought, children and old men, people, people like himself, and he had to do something, he had to move, he had to help, do something. He jerked the green medical bag off his back, ripping it open and grabbing for bandages, yelling at Molina to please come and help him. He knelt down in the middle of the screaming bodies and began bandaging them, trying to cover the holes where the blood was still spurting out. “It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay,” he tried to say, but he was crying now, crying and still trying to bandage them all up. He moved from body to body searching in the dark with his fingers for the holes the bullets had made, bandaging each one as quickly as he could, his shaking hands wet with the blood. It was raining into the hut and a cold wind swept his face as he moved in the dark.

The lieutenant had just come up with the others.

“Help me!” he screamed. “Somebody help!”

“Well goddamn it sergeant! What's the matter? How many did we kill?”

“They're children!” he screamed at the lieutenant.

“Children and old men!” cried Molina.

“Where are their rifles?” the lieutenant asked.

“There aren't any rifles,” he said.

“Well, help him then!” screamed the lieutenant to the rest of the men. The men stood in the entrance of the hut, but they would not move. “Help him, help him. I'm ordering you to help him!”

The men were not moving and some of them were crying now, dropping their rifles and sitting down on the wet ground. They were weeping now with their hands against their faces. “Oh Jesus, oh God, forgive us.”

“Forgive us for what we've done!” he heard Molina cry.

“Get up,” screamed the lieutenant. “What do you think this is? I'm ordering you all to get up.”

Some of the men began slowly crawling over the bodies, grabbing for the bandages that were still left.

By now some of the villagers had gathered outside the hut. He could hear them shouting angrily. He knew they must be cursing them.

“You better get a fucking chopper in here,” someone was yelling.

“Where's the radio man? Get the radio man!”

“Hello Cactus Red. This is Red Light Two. Ahhh this is Red Light Two. We need an emergency evac. We got a lot of wounded … ahh … friendly wounded. A lot of friendly wounded out here.” He could hear the lieutenant on the radio, trying to tell the helicopters where to come.

The men in the hut were just sitting there crying. They could not move, and they did not listen to the lieutenant's orders. They just sat with the rain pouring down on them through the roof, crying and not moving.

“You men! You men have got to start listening to me. You gotta stop crying like babies and start acting like marines!” The lieutenant who was off the radio now was shoving the men, pleading with them to move. “You're men, not babies. It's all a mistake. It wasn't your fault. They got in the way. Don't you people understand—they got in the goddamn way!”

When the medivac chopper came, he picked up the little boy who was lying next to the old man. His foot came off and he grabbed it up quickly and bandaged it against the bottom stump of the boy's leg. He held him looking into his frightened eyes and carried him up to the open door of the helicopter. The boy was still crying softly when he handed him to the gunner.

And when it was all over and all the wounded had been loaded aboard, he helped the lieutenant move the men back on patrol. They walked away from the hut in the rain. And now he felt his body go numb and heavy, feeling awful and sick inside like the night the corporal had died, as they moved along in the dark and the rain behind the lieutenant toward the graveyard.

I
T WAS GETTING
very cold and it was raining almost every day now. Some guy was sent back home because a booby trap had blown up on him. And it was about then I started looking for booby traps to step on, taking all sorts of crazy chances, trying to forget about the rain and the cold and the dead children and the corporal. I would go off alone sometimes on patrol looking for the traps, hoping I'd get blown up enough to be sent home, but not enough to get killed. It was a rough kind of game to play. I remember walking along, knowing goddamn well exactly what I was doing, just waiting for those metal splinters to go bursting up into my testicles, sending me home a wounded hero. That was the only way I was getting out of this place. I took more chances than ever before, daydreaming as I strolled through the minefields, thinking of the time I saw a guy named Johnny Temple play in Ebbets Field or the time Duke Snyder struck out and tossed that old bat of his up in the air when the umpire threw him out of the game.

One morning the battalion was blown almost completely apart by an artillery attack. We had been out on patrol most of the night lying in the rain. We weren't even awake when the first couple of rounds began to pound in all around us. There was a whistle, then a cracking explosion. They had us right on target. We all ran for our lives, trying to make it to the bunker we had dug for ourselves. I was still half-asleep and not quite conscious of what was happening to me. All I remember was that I had to get to the bunker. Finally, after what seemed a long time, we all crawled down into the sandbags. We huddled together like children and I heard myself saying “Oh God please God I want to live.” Artillery rounds kept crashing in and there was a tremendous explosion in the tent right next to ours. I wondered if anyone had been in it. I continued to pray with all the strength in me that I wouldn't be killed.

When the barrage finally lifted we all looked at each other feeling a little embarrassed for acting so frightened and praying behind the sandbags. Outside the bunker there was a sharp smell of gunpowder and people were beginning to move. I grabbed my green medical bag and told the rest of the men to stay in the bunker and I went out into the sand looking for anyone who was wounded. The first thing I saw was our tent all blown to shit. Big chunks of shrapnel had torn gaping holes through the corrugated tin roof and slashed through the tent like the thin stabs of a knife. We had been hit by almost 150 rounds in only a few minutes. Everyone was walking around in a daze.

There were a bunch of men over at the motor pool kneeling around someone on the ground. I ran over there as fast as I could, my dog tags jangling around my neck. They were kneeling around a guy I knew pretty well. Mac.

I looked down and saw that he was dead. His neck was almost off and his right arm had been severed. He had hundreds of silver holes in his face and chest, looking like little puncture points. MacCarthy was dead, bleeding in the sand, his dark blue Boston eyes open and staring up at the sky. I had just seen him the morning before on the chow line after we had come in from patrol. He had smiled at me and told me how everything was down at the motor pool. But now he was dead and I picked up my bag and walked back to the bunker, thinking how MacCarthy had just looked like a thing, a mannequin.
The dead, he thought, looked kind of funny in a way, kind of very ridiculous.
I felt almost like laughing and when I came up to the bunker there was the short kid from New Jersey who was taking pictures of the demolished tent. He was taking pictures with a little camera with the care and precision of a guy who should be shooting some pretty trees back home. I could see that a lot of the men were laughing and joking now, laughing and joking about the same thing.
It was like the boy scouts, like the boy scouts getting all chopped up in their pajamas while having a nightmare.

Another crowd had gathered around a trench. It was hard to tell what had happened there, how many bodies there were. Maybe three all mangled together in a heap, a bunch of arms and legs. There was a smell of gunpowder and blood mixed with burning flesh. One of the heads was completely severed, chopped off, with the exception of a strand of muscle—that was the only thing that continued to connect the head to the stinking corpse. There was nothing any of us could do but pick up the pieces. They seemed very cold and gray and someone in back of me was taking pictures. I fished around for identification in one corpse's dead back pocket and found a wallet. It was Sergeant Bo, one of my friends. He was the supply sergeant and had a wife somewhere. He was sort of the Sergeant Bilko of the battalion. He never went on patrol and had the most comfortable quarters of anyone, with a rug and a desk and a picture of his pretty wife. He had a very young face and now he was in that hole, mangled in that hole, stinking with the others.