The Turtle Warrior (20 page)

He felt betrayed. His own land had produced something beyond the unusual and explainable. He would never be able to work that field without sweaty palms and without looking over his shoulder. He could not know it then, but his dread would slowly deepen in the coming years. He wanted to tell Rosemary, but he suddenly wasn’t sure that she would believe him. There was only one person he could think of who might have been able to help him, who would have been able to explain what it was Ernie saw and what he should do. But Claude Morriseau was long dead.

WHEN MY LITTLE BROTHER WAS four, he became fascinated by the way the burners on our gas stove burst into blue flames when he turned the dials and how he could adjust the flames with a slight turn of the dials. I caught him one day and shook him.

“Your face could get burned!” I yelled. “Do you know what would happen if the stove suddenly went nuts? It would blow up on you!”

Then I turned on one of the burners and stuck my finger in the flame for a second. It hurt.
Christ, it hurt,
but it did what I wanted it to. I had scared Bill enough to make him cry.

Then I put my finger in my mouth to cool it off. I pulled it out and showed Bill the blistering skin on the tip of my finger and the blackened fingernail.

“This is what happens. Only
worse.”
I shook my finger in front of his face. I could smell my own burned flesh, and I could tell the smell got to him too. Bill gagged and threw up on the floor before he started crying like he always did. A deep breath and then a drum-roll building up.

“You’re scaring me!” he cried.

“You damn right I’m scarin’ you. I’m doin’ it for your own good. Don’t play with the stove! I better never catch you doing it again or I’ll stick
your
finger in the burner!”

For some odd reason this is what I thought about when I first became aware that I was on fire. I was burning, and not even screaming can make the sound that would tell someone how terrible it feels. How napalm is like being covered with scalding jelly and how it sticks to the skin, burning and burning until there is nothing left. Then that sudden rise, as though the ground had become a trampoline. It wasn’t a bouncing Betty. I had been thrown too high into the air for one of those evil fuckers. I don’t know if I was hit by one of our own shells or if I stepped on an NVA land mine. It was definitely a lot bigger than a grenade and gave off a cloud and a familiar smell. White phosphorus. All I know is that I was shot straight up into the air. The rush of air felt good, and the burning stopped instantly. I saw the flaming boot from my right foot, and it took me a few seconds to realize that my right leg was attached to it, glowing like a fluorescent lightbulb. It flipped end over end like a stick tossed through the air for a dog to retrieve. I looked down at myself, and everything that was me was no longer. Pieces of my body were blown
everywhere.
I didn’t think I’d leave Vietnam without some kind of wound, but I had hoped it would be a million-dollar one. I didn’t even get
peanuts,
our word for wounded in action. I got Kool-Aid. Killed in action. And I was doing what we joked about when we were stoned or drunk. When we were scared but wouldn’t admit to it. I was fertilizing Hill 881N. I could look down and see Lieutenant Miller’s body. I could see my buddy Marv. I could hear him screaming until the rest of the guys from the Fifth Division tackled him so that he’d shut up. “I lost Lucas! I can’t find Lucas! Goddamn motherfucker! He ran ahead of me!”

Actually I was running after Lieutenant Miller, who got a sudden case of buck fever. I knew he had stood up too soon, and I ran after him to knock him to the ground. He insisted that we charge the hill and reclaim it and proved it by being the first one. We only had one M-60 and not enough linked ammo for it. My M-16 kept jamming. I hated that fuckin’ gun. No matter how many times I cleaned it, took it apart, and put it back together, that damn thing jammed if you breathed on it. I wanted an M-14, but they wouldn’t give us any. I would have given anything for the Marlin I’d left at home. Our column had moved west on the hill in dense fog. Then, early in the afternoon, the fog lifted like a curtain on a stage, and we were surrounded by a mean audience of the NVA. We were too few in number and should have retreated until we got more reinforcements, but our orders were to stay. Miller took a round in the chest and another in his head. I felt a spray of something on my face, and then I tripped over him as he fell. I got up and tried to wipe my eyes so I could see, but it was as though I’d covered them with grease. Then I looked down at my hands, and the gray greasy stuff covering my hands and my face was from Miller’s head. I freaked out, and instead of running backward, I ran forward.

Cracker Jack had radioed in for air support when we realized the joke of our position in the clearing fog. I could barely hear him. The last thing I heard was Cracker Jack yelling:

Some help did come from overhead. An F-4 Phantom suddenly appeared and dropped the napalm that rose like a giant arm of fire. The napalm that hit me.

I wondered:
How is it I can still hear myself? How is it I can still think?
I didn’t see or hear Lieutenant Miller. I was floating in the sky, but I existed. I was conscious of being.

Just as I watched and felt my body tear apart, I then felt something else. A gathering of my senses. As though the invisible molecules that had belonged to me came together again. I remained above Khe Sanh for a day, saw the A-4 Skyhawks and the F-4s as they shelled around our sister Hill 881S and around the perimeter of the Khe Sanh Combat Base. There was a shitload of the NVA out there, but even with heavy bombing, they were hard to find. It didn’t matter how many of them were killed by bombs. Ol’ General Giap always had more. He opened his platoons like cages so that like an endless supply of mice, they kept coming and coming and coming.

Eventually everything that was green and beautiful would be bombed beyond recognition. The dead NVA soldiers would simmer and bloat in the sun, peel away and rot in the rain. The smell would be god-awful, like the spring pileup of winter kill from a large lake during a hard winter.

We were hunkered down on Hill 881S on the night before I bought it and joking about the movie we’d miss on Saturday night: Paradise, Hawaiian Style.

“Ha!” Marv said with a grin. “We are in a movie. Paradise
Khe Sanh Style.”

“Fuck,” Charlie Matheson said, “some paradise. Did you guys see Miss January?”

“The oh yeah, oh yeah Miss January that you left back at the base? How could you leave Miss January?” Marv joked. “We could use her pillows right now. Imagine resting your head on those babies.”

They laughed for a while and then were quiet. I crawled over to where Lieutenant Miller was sitting alone. Brooding. He asked me if I thought the sensors were off, that maybe there weren’t that many NVAs because they weren’t visible from the air.

I puckered my lips like some of the righteous old women I’d grown up with and pretended to be shocked. “You mean the sensors that we’re not supposed to know about?”

He laughed, and it made me feel good that I had cheered him up. It was supposedly top secret.
But come on.
All those Air Force jets dropping something in December and January. Something that we could barely see and that didn’t explode. It was clearly intelligence equipment of some kind, and it was more accurate than counting piles of elephant shit. Since we couldn’t stand up on patrol and yell, “Okay. Time’s up. How many of you little yellow fuckers are out there?” there had to be a way they knew the NVA was massing up. They always assumed that we couldn’t figure it out. But we knew. The Bru tribe of highland people that picked over the food in the base’s garbage dump suddenly disappeared the week before we bivouacked on Hill 881S. If you didn’t have to fight, then was the time to get the hell out. Miller found out what it was they dropped even though it was supposedly
classified.
The equipment was called ASIDS. Air-delivered seismic intrusion devices. In other words, tiny microphones draped over tree branches that detected enemy sound and movement. Did that sound like James Bond or what?
How lucky we were.
Even John Wayne never had ASIDS.

It always pissed me off when our own higher-ups thought we were stupid. I think when some of those officers work their way to the top, they lose their fighting intuition. They had experience but no sense. Hell, they lost all five of them and often that extra sense that comes from fear. Your face buried in mud, your knees pulled up to your chest, your neck hunched down. Squeezing your eyes shut against tears and praying that your flak jacket and helmet would do what they said they would: protect you from flying shrapnel. I felt like I had eyes in the back of my head. Just like Mom did when she caught me doing something and I couldn’t figure how the hell she saw me or knew. There was never just one NVA. If you saw one, you calculated fifty to that one.

“You know we never get an accurate description,” I said. “Those five officers that were shot just after New Year’s were wearing uniforms that look a lot like ours.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but you’ve been out there. What do you think?”

I thought about the green hills around us and what it must have been like for the Bru and the other Yard tribes who lived there a hundred, maybe two hundred years ago. How Kho’s family found everything to eat, in addition to the rice they grew, in those hills. What I would do if I had been born there.

“I think that they know this fuckin’ place a lot better than we do.”

I tried to stay above the smoke filling the sky. I remembered thinking how much it looked like the smoke spewed out of the stacks from the Wilson paper mill. I looked down at all my friends. I knew the stubbornness of those guys, and I was both proud and pissed at them. They would look for me no matter what. Even if it killed them just looking for my dog tags. I also knew that they’d stay trenched in that shithole known officially as the KSCB until they were ordered out. Some of us called it Private Piles’ Plateau. Just like a bad case of hemorrhoids, the base would bleed and bleed until almost no one was left.