The Turtle Warrior (30 page)

IT WAS AS MUCH A shock to me as it probably was to my mother when I spoke out loud, when I realized that I could speak and be heard. I have feelings too, which is weird. Although not pain in the physical sense. I have the memory of pain, the burning of my body. My mother once said the same thing about giving birth: that she could remember the pain but could no longer feel it. But humor has never left me. Sometimes my laughter echoes through the trees although I’m not sure anyone can hear it.

I laugh a lot. The history of my short life is fuckin’ funny. Joining the Marines was not the smartest move I could have made. I was so conned. At first I thought the Marine Corps and my drill sergeant were just an extension of my old man, and in some ways they were. I was never good enough for him either, and he reminded me of it since the day I was born. Somehow he thought it would toughen me up. I believed him before I figured it out. I had hoped that at some point I would be good enough for him and then he would love me. Well, once I learned to shoot at twelve and got bigger at fifteen, I figured out part of it, and that took care of that. I refused to believe in his lies, in his little
stories.
I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me. After fifteen he didn’t scare me anymore, and in fact I scared him. But he’d done his damage. If it hadn’t been for Ernie, I wouldn’t have thought I was worth being alive. I might have ended up dead anyway like Terry. Besides being a 4-F because of all his smoking, Terry was generally just a lowlife. I can see that now. I watched him get drunk that spring of 1968, hit the gas, and plow his car into a telephone pole. I would never have wanted him in Nam with me. Terry would never have protected me. He only would have watched out for himself. Most bullies do that.

I was one of the most physically fit grunts, but still the first six weeks of basic training were beyond, hell. I got the piss beaten out of me through every sadistic drill the Marines had thought up over the years. Sergeant Davidson called me a pussy so many times that I got paranoid, as though the continual suggestion might actually make it true. I would look at myself every now and then just to make sure I still had a dick. Davidson threatened to write me up as
unsatisfactory,
which was nothing new. My old man’s vocabulary never extended that far although he said the same thing when he called me a dumb-ass. We all were treated as though we were a dented can of peas that couldn’t be put on the shelf for sale.

That changed when we got down to serious rifle training.

I blew their minds. I picked up a rifle, any rifle. I could shoot with my eyes closed. I could see through thick woods and cover and focus on the smallest target in the time it took Davidson to raise his finger and pick his nose. A marshmallow on a branch. Half a marshmallow. Then half of a half of a marshmallow.

“Pretty boy can shoot,” Sergeant Davidson drawled. “Our man Elvis here might be worth something after all.”

Davidson quit calling me the worst of the names he used on all of us and chose me, among the select few, to go on for more weapons training.

“You’re a natural leader,” he told me one day, and all I said was, “Yes, sir.” But how nuts is that? I could shoot. How did that make me a leader?

The goal of the military is to take your brain, wipe it clean of anything you have ever cherished, and write its own bullshit on it. I had grown up with my old man’s mind games. I was not as vulnerable as some of the guys. As much as I hated the Corps in basic, I discovered that unlike my old man, it did give me some skills to survive by. And something I’d felt only when I spent time with Ernie: a sense of pride. Not necessarily American pride, but pride in belonging to the Marines. They wanted me. Was that so bad? It was not so much the Corps as it was the guys I met and trained with. I got a whole slew of brothers when I joined up, with only a few of them being assholes like in any family. I was worth something to them. They were worth something to me. That was the secret of survival. If I was conned, then the Corps was conned on another level. Once we landed in Nam, we could see that the Corps was dicked around just like any other branch of the military by LBJ and Westy. By McNamara, who my buddy Rick nicknamed McNightmare. But when we first landed on Okinawa, we were treated like the sons of Zeus. Then a week before some of us in the Fifth Division were scheduled to rotate into the Khe Sanh Combat Base, Sergeant Fuller laid it down real and gritty.

“Martinson! Wipe that shit-eatin’ grin off your face. This is not a Boy Scout trip!” he roared. “Some of you are not comin’ back. Do you hear me? But at the same time you will come back. The Corps will never leave you. But I want you to understand one thing. You are
never
to leave one another. Do you understand me?
NEVER!
If you stick together, most of you might come out of this shithole alive. And another thing: Always keep your rifles
clean.”

Marv Martinson had bad dreams that night. Rick and I had to wake him up, to keep him from yelling so much. I wasn’t going to buy all of it. I was gonna go home, come hell or high water. I think I survived as long as I did by thinking about Bill.

Barricaded inside the KSCB, I would think about how my brother had a way of traveling inside his own body. How he seemed born with the ability to ignore our old man. He had no illusions. He didn’t love the old man and didn’t need his approval. I wanted to know what that was like, to travel so lightly, to need so little. Only after I got drunk or stoned did I even get near to what I thought that experience was.

I became good friends with one of the Bru scouts. We called him Peanut Butter Pete sometimes because he loved peanut butter so much. But his real name was Kho. He was my age, which shocked me at first. He looked older, and he had kids. Once his daughter became sick, and he left us for a few days. When he came back, I asked him if his daughter was better. He said she was, but that was all he said. I wondered what she was sick with and how she got better. Then our chaplain explained to me that the Bru believed that when someone is sick, a bad spirit is living in that person and causing the sickness. So Kho’s family cooked rice and other food and put it on a little altar in their house to feed the bad spirit. I guess they hoped the bad spirit would crawl out of his daughter and go after the food. When I thought about it, it made sense.

Kho told me that there were spirits everywhere. Once when we were returning from a short patrol, we came to the edge of a rice paddy. Kho made us stop, and he covered his mouth and shook his head. We were not to talk. I thought it was because he saw a North Vietnamese. But it wasn’t that. The people from his village were harvesting the rice. Silently. Nobody talked. It was weird seeing all those women working without saying a word. The way their small hands slid up the stalk and stripped off the seed heads without dropping any of them. Kho told me later that to talk while harvesting the rice would anger the rice spirits, and they might cause the crop to fail the next year.

I thought about Bill then. About the way he could not go to sleep until I crawled into my own bed. He thought there was a monster under his bed. It didn’t matter how many times I shone the flashlight under there to show him that there was nothing but dust bunnies and mouse turds. He was stubborn. He said that something pinched his toes at night, and it lived underneath his bed.

I teased him. “Maybe it’s your damn mice. Or your hamster. Maybe they’re getting out of their cages at night and biting your feet.”

“No!”

Christ, he was stubborn about it.

I thought about Bill’s funny ways. I was ashamed on those nights when I thought about him. I don’t know what came over me when I was mean to him. When I hung him by his ankles from the bridge, knowing that if someone had done it to me, I’d have beaten the pulp out of him. Or the time that Terry and I dumped a whole bottle of Tabasco sauce in a glass of grape juice and gave it to him. Bill took a big drink of it and started to choke. I was terrified, but at least I remembered not to give him water to clear it. I poured milk into his mouth. Water would only have spread the pepper sauce whereas milk helped neutralize it. A fact I learned in first aid and that bubbled up just then when I needed it. Bill ran and hid in the upstairs closet, his mouth and throat burning. I could hear his gasps between crying. I told Terry to go home. Then I went into the barn loft and beat hay bales with a baseball bat until I broke it and finally cried. What was wrong with me? To make it worse, my brother always came back to me, looked up at me with those eyes the color of aspen bark. So hopeful. As though he could see some good in me when I was just a lousy bastard.

Some nights when I felt afraid, I would think about him fighting with that wooden sword that I had made for him in shop class and that snapping turtle shell he used as a shield. There was never anyone out there in the barnyard. Just my brother, spinning on the balls of his feet and shouting threats to some imaginary enemy. I would watch him from my window in the barn loft and shake my head. I told Mom once that I thought Bill was retarded. She got mad and then laughed.

“Retarded! Do you know what his school tests say?” she said. “You’re smart too, but Bill’s IQ is supposedly near genius level. So much for his being retarded. He’s just different. Always has been.”

Then she laughed and hugged me. “You are both smart boys.”

All those boxes from home. Cookies, sweet rolls, venison sausage, candy, and clean underwear. I didn’t have the heart to write to my mother and tell her that I could buy underwear at the PX cheaper than what she had paid for them at home. I knew Bill helped Mom pack the boxes, and he did what only Bill would do. The entire box was usually lined with cedar leaves from our swamp and sometimes with leaves of wintergreen. All the food had a faint aftertaste of cedar, but that was okay. It did something to the rest of the guys too. After the box was empty, the smell of cedar lingered and possessed them. Nobody wanted to throw the empty boxes out. They had to smell them and even rub their faces against the cardboard. In addition to the cedar, each box always had a little something extra that Bill had found. One box had a shed garter snake skin wrapped in tissue. Another box had a mud turtle’s shell and a smooth skipping stone from the river. The box I received just before Christmas had Mom’s fruitcake in it, and a Canada goose feather had been placed on top of the cake. I was made to understand that I wasn’t allowed to open those boxes until most of the guys could be present. It was as though they all wanted to belong to that box somehow. I could pretend to be a Marine, a fighting man without ties to distract him, but I was James Peter Lucas and I was from northern Wisconsin and my brother sent me continual proof of our home.

Kho was there too. He would not touch the snakeskin or the turtle shell, the stone or the goose feather. But the cedar he put up to his nose just like the rest of the guys. Cedar is like that. You can’t get enough of that smell.

“Your brother,” he said to me one night as we sat out near the razor wire, “holds many spirits in here.” Kho tapped his chest.

I didn’t know what to say back. Kho didn’t look as though he expected me to say anything. I thought about it. I was raised to think that we all were supposed to have souls, and it’s funny but when Kho tapped his chest, I realized that I had always thought that souls did live in the chest area. At least that’s where the nuns implied the soul lived, and we all were supposed to have souls although my friend Terry told me something different.

“Girls have souls,” Terry whispered, leaning over in class. “Boys have guts.”

But I never believed I had a soul. If I couldn’t see it or feel it, then it didn’t exist for me. Still, after what Kho said, I had to wonder. Then I thought about those people with their brains in their asses. I suppose they are sitting on their souls too. Kho was right when it came to Bill. I think that was where Bill traveled to when he was quiet. His soul filled with spirits.

I found a way to puncture a hole in the turtle shell so that I could tie it to my gun belt. Everybody had some sort of lucky charm he carried. Most of them were harmless but significant. There were a few guys, though, that lost it. Mostly the Special Forces guys who went nuts after their second tour. I can’t even say out loud what they carried or kept as souvenirs. What they shot at for the hell of it. I kept my gun with me at all times, knowing that it wasn’t just the VC or the North Vietnamese I had to be afraid of.