Love and Other Ways of Dying (33 page)

So God was urging you to make a stand here—Jesus against the money changers. The guinea worm was everywhere: You had a young man die in your arms, shot in the head on the street. Made no sense. And now you were fixated on the incubus and succubus in this shotgun shack across the street—a slave quarter is what you called it. Later, in court, your lawyer would say you were afflicted with urban psychosis, haunted by ghosts. He would say that you snapped. But it was simpler than that: You woke one morning, bought a five-dollar gas container, filled it with unleaded, stalked across the street to that slave shack. Some hapless bystander tried to stop you, three hundred righteous moving pounds of you, and you said, Move! And he moved.

Kicked down the door then, almost off its hinges. Doused the place with gasoline, splattered it until the house filled with
that smell of high-octane salvation. Made sure no one was there, then lit a match and threw it on the floor. And the whole thing leaped with flames. A pyre. Fire funneling up the walls and cascading back down them; ceiling coming down in a rain of magma. Couch, chairs, garbage, termites—all of it shrinking on itself, consuming itself. You could feel the heat on your back as you walked away. An awesome heat. Heat hotter than the street, yeah. People were pointing at you, murmuring, but you didn’t run—you just went back to the laundromat and prayed. Later, when you saw a cop car cruising the neighborhood, you flagged it down, said to the officer: I’m the one you need to arrest.

You were offered a bargain on a couple of felony counts: plead guilty before the judge and get a reduced sentence. Your lawyer, Mr. Sam Berry, chatted with you, accompanied you to court—a no-brainer, six years maybe commuted to two and a half—and when the judge asked you how you meant to plead, you said, without hesitation,
Not guilty.
Mr. Sam Berry cleared his ear canal, perplexed. Can’t cop a plea if you say not guilty! That’s legal cognitive dissonance. Mr. Sam Berry’s mouth dropped. Like, What the hell are you talking about, man? You did it; you admit it! Let’s cop a plea and be done! And you: Yes, I did it, but I’m not guilty. I’m not guilty on earth as it is in heaven. Aim to prove that, yeah.

So Mr. Sam Berry went to work. Everybody, it seemed, had heard about you. Calls came from the networks: You were their vigilante, what America needed. An anonymous supporter put up $15,000 for your bond. The little old ladies testified to your good name. A detective told the jury that what you did was wrong but admitted there were many who admired your guts, your honesty. Yes, you did it, but look around. It was your obligation. No help from the government, no help from the cops. After all, you had a responsibility to your people, to protect them and find them
greener pastures. To carry them on your broad shoulders, to keep them from the mouth of the wolf. Plain and simple.

See, you came to Tamarind Avenue to destroy the wolf.

The jury exonerated you on the arson charges after less than an hour’s deliberation. Go free, cosmic commander, take back the streets.

Which is where you are now—after these 37 years of your human life, after 259 dog years, after one blink of a cosmic eye—with the sun piercing your head on Tamarind Avenue, melting the asphalt. The sidewalk gives with each one of your oversized steps, Mr. Samuel Mohammed. The thud of your big leather combat boots sounds out a warning.
He is coming! He is coming!
Your fingers are the size of peninsulas; your biceps rise beneath your fatigues like two Vesuviuses. Walking staff is a redwood tree. You’re a planet unto yourself.

You’re so big, in fact, you must love yourself more, pride yourself with extra pride, gulp additional air, all in order to share your love with your earthly brothers and sisters. To bring them the Word. You must be prepared to lay down your life for them—and the more your life is worth, the more willing you have to be to lay it down. That is what the good man believes, the righteous man, yeah. Let them call you freak or hero, murderer or messiah, Mr. Samuel Mohammed. You’re the massive one-man black-belt power attack. And on Tamarind Avenue today, where there once stood a slave-quarter crack house, there’s nothing but an empty lot of dust and broken bottles. Lay it down on the shattered glass and red dust, pure, messianic brother, and call it the Promised Land.

Now check yourself one more time. Do you feel strong? Do you have two feet planted on this earth and two lungs that work? Say,
a nice ranch house on a deepwater bayou in St. Pete Beach, Florida? Then it’s true: You ain’t a hero, sir. You’re fifty-four years old and alive, but you ain’t a hero. Fishing your days, watching these heartbreaking sunsets come down in indigo tracers over the Gulf of Mexico. How many times have you seen your reflection in the bathroom mirror and wondered what that ornate piece of brass in your bottom drawer rightly makes you, anyway?

Name: Gary Lee Littrell. Rank: command sergeant major first class, U.S. Army, retired. In khakis and colorful short-sleeves now. Square, open face, steel-blue eyes, trimmed hair, an impish grin, and a muscle in your jaw that pulses when you turn serious. Career military; solid as a fence post. Out this morning in the
Eagle Five
, an eighteen-foot fishing boat named for your call sign, out with your son—fine boy with the same exact eyes—reeled in six smart-looking trout, fried ’em up for lunch. Sit around in these twilights, out by the dock with a couple of friends who live in the neighborhood, telling fish stories, checking the water for the occasional manatee.

Your buddies each have the medal, too. You encouraged both of them to come to St. Pete Beach. They had their reasons for needing a new life. You said, Come on down and we’ll get you set up. And now you sit out here together, beneath the palm fronds and American flag, drinking Cokes, talking fish at sunset, marveling at the manatees, big, white, ghostly things, gentle as can be, going extinct because these speeding prop boats slice them up in the water, gouge their backs. Really, just talking about anything but—Hey, it’s a hot, humid one, ain’t it? Lookee at that sky. Sure is gorgeous! But maybe you’re all thinking it anyway: Not unlike Vietnam. Not unlike it at all, thank you.

See, the past belongs in the past, and yet much of who you are today is still back there, somewhere near Dak Seang, in Kontum Province, bordering Cambodia. A real place under a strange
sky on a hot, humid night not unlike this one. In April 1970, you, sir, were a twenty-six-year-old American adviser moving with a ranger battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers and three other Americans, including Lieutenant Raymond Green, your soul-on-ice comrade in arms, your brown-skinned double. You drank with him, slept next to him, shadowed each other everywhere. You both had the smell of the country on you, spoke Vietnamese, ate your meals with the men. They were good soldiers, vengeance fighters, brothers.

Hill 763 rose from paddies through chokes of bamboo to a bald nub at its peak, most of it set beneath a double canopy of jungle, the kind so thick it turns day into night, creates its own cloying underworld. Nearly five hundred of you humped up, then settled down on that hill to clear a forward-fire support base. You established what you thought was a safe defensive perimeter. Until you heard the first mortar rounds—that sudden, sickening pit in your stomach—and when they hit, things got ugly fast. A burning, sulfury smell of flesh and powder. Bodies scattered everywhere across this sudden crater.

Your first realization was that Lieutenant Green, who’d just been next to you, was gone—not only dead but torn apart, no longer whole. Ornaments in a tree. Everything inside you went numb; gravity tripled and brought you to a knee. The two other Americans were seriously wounded, mortars and rockets sizzling up the hill, and, folks, it was just you now, you and maybe three hundred of your South Vietnamese brothers left to stand down five thousand Vietcong moving on your position. The odds did not favor you, Sergeant Littrell.

You’d seen other men just surrender, curl up out of fear in a bunker, wetting their pants, letting the gods have their way. But no, it wasn’t even a decision; it was reflex: You decided to fight. Lifted your M16 and went forward, drove yourself through the
air. Move feet, run. Go, boy! Through hails of gunfire and mortar attacks, you collected the injured, reorganized the battalion. You worked the radio until you had the damn thing shot out of your hands, found another and kept going. It turned dark, a sky with no moon, and you placed the wounded near a makeshift landing pad, then went out there waving flares and strobes to signal a medevac. That brought on enemy machine guns, fire so furious no Dustoff could land. Even then, you waved the light all night. Out there like some haw lantern, marking your position. A ghost who wouldn’t fall. Faced with your inevitable death, you didn’t see the Holy Spirit—no, somehow you
became
the Holy Spirit. Bullets passed through without touching.

Four days and nights without food or sleep—misery and things from a nightmare. Maniacal, sir—maniacal. Shots of adrenaline and morphine to stay awake, jacked right to the ceiling. Spoke in Vietnamese to your brothers. Rallied them, lifted them up.
Danh!
Fight! The enemy massed for three human-wave assaults, and you, Sergeant Littrell, went to where they were coming, could hear their voices yourself in the bamboo, a deep, spooky feeling, and called in air strikes to within fifty yards of your own body, five-hundred-pound bombs that knocked you off your feet. To the ground, then up again. Again and again. Just like a Sunday stroll.

People dying like so many lepers around you. And bodies. Bodies everywhere. Then, on the fourth day, in a delirium, beneath another hail of mortars, when the will to fight had begun to seep from your body, you accepted your own death, too. You didn’t think about your mama, didn’t have some private conversation with God. Didn’t have to wonder if you’d been a good man. Or what freedom meant to you. No, you just let everything get peaceful. You just stayed inside yourself for a moment, let yourself fill some small space on this planet one last time, fill it
completely; like coming home to yourself, the weight of your body on this earth, your two feet on the ground, your lungs sucking air. Then you opened your eyes.

And yes, as sure as you were going to die, there came the miraculous reversal, the deus ex machina, the cavalry! Vietcong still swarming up Hill 763 for your big send-off to the Promised Land, ambushing and mortaring, grenading and machine-gunning, and suddenly you had a sky full of American bombers. Radioed them down on your position. Flying now yourself. You were just a shadow lost in these deafening bomb blasts, calling in more and more and more. And every time a bomb dropped farther down the hill, you and your hobbling men scrambled into the new crater, surrounded by amulets, all these Vietcong body parts. You carried one of your injured men on your back, dragged two others. And you all kept moving. Until there was nothing but silence. Until you’d come down off that hill with 41 walking wounded—you, impossibly, were only dehydrated—and the choppers filled the sky on their way to recover your 431 dead.

Later, when they fixed a big steak that you couldn’t touch because your stomach had shrunk on itself like a dead leaf and you were frazzled on morphine and adrenaline, about to get sucked into some tsunami of withdrawal—when the Holy Spirit finally departed your body—you couldn’t remember half of what had happened up there, what you’d said on the radio, how you’d danced with the flares. You were empty. But then there was no language for what you remembered.

President Nixon put this Medal of Honor around your neck so you would never forget. The citation called you “superhuman.” And yet you never felt weaker. Everywhere you went now, you were followed by the 431 dead men. Sometimes in the mirror, it was Lieutenant Green looking back.

So check yourself, sir. Lounging by the dock in St. Pete
Beach with your two buddies, Sergeant Frank Miller and Captain Ron Ray. Both medal winners, too. Lit upon by the enemy, their bodies grenaded and machine-gunned, each literally half dead, they got up off their backs and they fought. Maniacally. Driven by some reflex beneath the reflex. Now, like you, they have graying hair and thickening bellies. Even today, it’s hard to know what the medal makes you feel: proud, thankful, strong. Imperfect, lonely, mortal. Days it makes you feel more like an outsider. Makes you feel like a fraud, because all the real heroes are dead.

But then lookee at this sunset, this sky full of indigo tracers and deep-coral colors. There’s an American flag luffing in a soft breeze. There are two men at this table—Sergeant Miller and Captain Ray—who know without having to say. You just sit, drinking Cokes, telling fish stories. Talking about everything and nothing. Some nights, they’ve got your back covered, help carry you down that hill without saying anything about it.

There was one night out in this deepwater bayou when you, Command Sergeant Major Gary Lee Littrell, went to the dock alone, just stood there a while, watching the pelicans, trying to feel something. When you looked down in the dark water, you were surprised by two huge, white manatees looking back at you with those mournful, wrinkled eyes. As if they’d come from another world, silently floating there, as if they alone possessed some secret, wordless language. They were just hovering there, underwater, big, gentle animals with gouged backs. These vanishing, beautiful things showed themselves to you once and then were gone.

So it’s now been five years in the Sudan, Jason Matus, and you’ve been given a Dinka name:
Majok dit.
A black bull with a white crown on its head. You’ve been offered gifts—ivory walking
sticks and golden pipes made from bullet casings and goats, more skinny goats than you would ever know what to do with. They might be starving, but the Dinka will give you, an American, their last goat.

You came into the country as an innocent, and now you’re experienced. The fish has grown strong even as some of your coworkers have been killed. You’ve waded through thick crowds at hundreds of food drops, reached out to clasp thousands of reaching hands, lost your mind in the heat, pushed and yelled for people to clear the drop zone, and been trampled in riots from the Hunger. You’ve sat in the dirt, covered in red dust, trying to assess caloric intake and the nutritional value of shea butter nut, lalob, wild rice, cassava, tubers, yams, and tamarind. You talk slowly, like Boris Badenov, yeah? Understand, my brother? Listen, what I say might save you.