The world played chess, p.17
The World Played Chess, page 17
I fall under Charlie Company, First Platoon, Third Squad (one-three). Charlie Company is commanded by Captain Dennis Martinez. Lieutenant Brad Dickson runs the First Platoon. He came on board about three weeks ago. Cruz runs the Third Squad. There’s been a bit of a power struggle because Dickson has been in-country less than a month, straight out of OCS, and Cruz is in the middle of his second tour, almost all of it spent in the bush. Cruz has seen everything and anything, but Dickson seems intent on telling Cruz what to do, a playground power play. Cruz told me not to worry about it, that Captain Martinez has his back.
Bean told me if Dickson doesn’t listen and puts him in danger, he’ll frag his ass in the bush, which means roll a frag grenade up behind him.
The first guy from our company outside the wire was Whippet, a gung-ho marine from Idaho who asked to go first. We call him Whippet because he’s built like one of those lean dogs with the pointed face and he has boundless energy. We were to fall out one at a time, three meters between us. Whippet made the sign of the cross, kissed the crucifix hanging around his neck, gave all of us a big grin and a thumbs-up, and stepped outside the wire. I’d been outside the wire, but this time felt different. This felt real. We expected to engage Charlie, to engage the NVA. I had goose bumps on my arms and tingling up and down my spine and along the nape of my neck. My entire body was a bundle of nerves, adrenaline, and anxiety.
Guys who have been here awhile say the tingling is a premonition of death. I think they’re joking. I hope they’re joking.
Cruz smiled when I reached the wire. “You ready, Shutter?”
I nodded.
“You got your film?”
“Yeah,” I said, but my throat and mouth were dry, and the word came out as a croak.
“Let’s hope you don’t have to use it. I like my search-and-destroy humping the way I like my helicopter rides.”
“What?” I asked, uncertain I had heard him correctly.
“Boring.” He smiled.
I returned the smile, but mentally I was having images of a helicopter crashing and burning.
Chapter 14
July 13, 1979
During each softball game that summer, I felt like I was sitting on a keg of gunpowder about to explode. With Greg and others yelling insults at the other team’s players, an explosion was inevitable and, I believe, provoked on this Friday night so that we’d forfeit the game and no longer be undefeated. Teams couldn’t beat us on the field, so they took a different tack. They all knew the league had warned us about our behavior.
This night the chirping started in the second inning. I don’t recall what was said by who, but the umpires warned both benches we’d forfeit if the chirping got worse. That was usually all we needed to hear. The Northpark Yankees were in first place. None of us wanted to forfeit a game and risk wrecking an undefeated season.
With a runner on first base, the opposing team’s batter hit a screaming line drive to Louie, our third baseman. Louie fielded the ball cleanly and winged it to me covering second base. I grabbed the ball, turned, and fired to first base. The runner breaking toward second base, although clearly out, ducked under the ball and hit me with his shoulder, like a linebacker, planting me hard on the dirt infield. I would have yelled, but I couldn’t find my voice. The guy had knocked the wind out of me.
Mike, our shortstop, dropped his glove and went after the guy, throwing punches. The benches emptied, guys raced onto the field and in from the outfield. I managed to get to my feet to keep from being trampled, then heeded my high school education and stumbled away. I was no match for the behemoths streaming onto the field when healthy. I could barely breathe, and my shoulder burned as if on fire. I vaguely heard the umpires yelling and the fans in the stands cursing and shouting obscenities. Punches were thrown, blood, ripped jerseys. This was a brawl.
In the middle of this chaos, the other team’s first baseman, a bearded player as big as a mountain, came out of the dugout and jogged toward me. This guy would snap me across his leg like the toothpicks Todd chewed, but unlike in the fights with my high school buddies, I could think of no way out of this situation. I couldn’t run and look like a coward, though I contemplated it. I dropped my glove and expected to get killed.
A blur caught my peripheral vision. William. My height, but William had lost weight over the summer, so he was likely no more than 150 pounds. Yes, he had at one time been a New Jersey State wrestling champion, but nobody in their right mind would take on the approaching guy.
William stepped in front of me and pointed at the oncoming mountain. “I want you!” he said and went into a wrestler’s stance.
The guy shifted his eyes from me to William, seemingly uncertain that William had directed his challenge at him. He’d probably never been challenged before and certainly not by some banty rooster. William threw his glove, showing absolutely no fear. Not an ounce. His eyes had become black pinpoints.
The mountain stopped and raised his hands. “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Take it easy. I got no beef with you.”
“You and me. Let’s go, big boy,” William said.
The guy actually backed up. Incredible. “I just wanted to make sure the kid was all right.”
It was apparent to me that the guy’s intent was to make sure I was all right. William, however, was in fight-or-flight mode.
“William,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s okay. William.” Then a thought occurred to me. “Shutter,” I said. William jerked his head and looked at me. “It’s okay,” I said.
It took a few seconds before William’s pupils contracted and his eyes returned to blue. He looked confused, as if uncertain where we were, as if he had gone someplace else.
Eventually order was restored. The umpires called a forfeit. Both teams took a loss. Guys picked up hats and gloves and walked off the field with buttons ripped from jerseys, welts that would become bruises, and bloodied knuckles and noses. The worst of it was a cut over our center fielder’s eye, which guys fixed with a butterfly bandage from an emergency medical kit the ball field kept.
We went to Village Host and relived the incident until everyone calmed down or had enough beer to forget it.
As night settled and guys departed with their girlfriends and wives, William sat alone at a table smoking a cigarette and drinking his beer. Monica, his girlfriend, was not there this night. William sat with his head against the wall, as if taking everything in. He looked at peace, but when he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, his hand shook more violently than I had seen to that point.
I took a seat on the wooden bench across the table from him.
William rolled his head and smiled at me. He was high. “Vincenzo,” he said in a soft voice.
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?”
“Taking on that guy.”
William shrugged. “Turned out it wasn’t much of a fight.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, interested in his rationale. “I mean, the guy was huge.”
William smiled. He kept his head against the wall and took another drag on his cigarette. “Did I tell you why I joined the marines?”
“You said it was hot and there was no one standing in line at the marine recruiting office.”
He laughed. “Yeah. That was one reason.” He stubbed out his cigarette and sat forward. “I joined the marines because I believed they were badasses, and I figured if I was going to go into a fight, and I was, I wanted to go in with the meanest fuckers on the planet. I didn’t want the guy next to me to hesitate when the shit hit the fan. I wanted someone I could trust to have my back.”
“I understand,” I said.
“No. You don’t.” His statement took me aback, sort of like when he told me I didn’t know scared. “That’s what I thought, but there was a lot I didn’t understand. A lot I had to learn.” He told me about the day he rode a bus to Parris Island for boot camp, and about a big southern recruit who thought he was a tough guy and ran into a drill instructor half his size and ended up doing countless push-ups.
“The rest of us figured if they could handle the biggest guy, they could do the same, or worse, to us.”
“You wanted to stop the fight tonight?” I asked, not sure I understood. “That’s why you went after the biggest guy?”
William smiled, like he hid a secret. “No. The point was, I realized at that moment that we were no longer people. We were no longer individuals. We had become numbers, interchangeable parts that would fight as one. We weren’t supposed to think about how big our opponent was, how strong, how many, or how much ammunition we had. We were marines. We did our job, without hesitation. We followed orders. We achieved our objective. Did I choose that guy tonight? Was I trying to stop the fight?” Another smile. “That’s a good story, Vincenzo, and I won’t stop you from telling it, but I’d be lying if I said I was. I wasn’t thinking about how big the guy was or the consequences of what I was doing. I was trained not to think about consequences. I was trained to fight whoever was there.” He stubbed out his cigarette and leaned across the table littered with pizza trays and empty beer pitchers. “The big guy was just there.”
Like the California beach and the girls in bikinis had just been there, I thought. William didn’t think about consequences, about his past, or about his future. He stayed in the present. I assumed the present was difficult enough.
PART IV
PAINT IT BLACK
May 10, 1968
The hardest thing to accept is that death is real. Forever. Permanent. I’d served as an altar boy at funerals and I’d seen bodies in caskets at church, but those people were already in the coffin. They were old. Some had been sick. I didn’t know them. To me they had always been dead. They looked like wax replicas of people. They weren’t real. So death wasn’t real.
Not these marines. Not Kenny. And not the half a dozen I’ve watched die since we’ve been outside the wire. These marines are young. My age. I shared a barrack with them. I traded C rations with them. I humped with them. I went through boot camp with some, ITR with others. Back then, before we arrived in-country, we talked about our lives, where we lived, the high schools we attended, the girls we screwed. We talked about going out with our buddies, fixing up cars, cruising strips. Now I’m taking photographs of their dead bodies.
The concept of permanency isn’t something I ever thought about. Why would I? I’m young and healthy and in great shape. Ask a normal nineteen-year-old in New Jersey about death, and he’ll say, “Why are you asking me?” We don’t think we’ll ever die, or even grow old.
But here, we die. Every day. We die and everything goes on, the same as before. I now know what Cruz meant when he said, “Don’t make friends.” It isn’t personal, but someday I may be putting you in a body bag and it’s easier if I don’t know you.
It happens so quickly, death. One moment you’re here. The next moment you’re gone. Zipped up in a body bag and helicoptered out. The military doesn’t give us time to process the death, because there is no time. They tell us to put it out of our minds. They don’t want you thinking about it. Saddle up and move out. You’re still here. You still have a job to do.
But I’m tired, man, and I don’t have the strength to get the dying out of my head. I don’t have the strength to hump eighty pounds of shit in this unrelenting heat and humidity and clear my head. I wake up thinking about death. I think about it as we hump. I go to sleep thinking about it.
Today was worse.
I stared at EZ, a Black kid from Georgia. We called him EZ because everything about him was EZ. He was never in a rush to do or say anything. “Take it EZ,” he’d say all the time and usually with a bright smile. EZ had boyish features, a square jaw, an EZ smile. That’s how I’ll remember him. “Relax. Take it EZ.” EZ’s real name was Eric Johnson. I know this only because I read his dog tags when we removed them, put one in a bag, and taped the bag to his wrist so EZ can be processed as a KIA. He’s forever young now.
EZ stepped on a booby trap, a hand grenade, they think. Booby traps, Bouncing Bettys, toe poppers, ambush mortars. They’re everywhere we hump. Every day, another guy loses a leg. If he’s lucky, that’s all he loses. The unlucky ones, like EZ, buy the farm. If it’s a mortar, several marines may buy the farm. We heard of a 250-pound buried bomb taking out an entire platoon.
You think, I’m lucky. I can still walk.
But then you wonder how far you’ll make it before you trip a wire or step on a Bouncing Betty. How far will you get before they blow up an ambush mortar, then cut you down with machine gun fire and RPGs? It gets so that you don’t want to take that first step. You don’t want to lift your foot off the ground for fear you’ve triggered an explosive. You want to stand in place. Stay safe.
Except you can’t.
Saddle up. Move out.
It’s mentally draining, not knowing with each step you take.
EZ had been humping directly in front of me, our line spaced three meters between marines for just this reason. When the explosion detonated, I thought it was incoming. The ground exploded, and EZ’s body flew upward and to the left. I fell backward from the force of the blast, though most of the energy went the other direction, as did most of the shrapnel. Marines in front of EZ and behind me got hit, though not too bad. They’re the lucky ones. They’re going to the rear for a little R & R. Some may get to go home. I didn’t get a scratch. Not a mark on me.
I grabbed my rifle and scrambled for cover until Cruz came down the line yelling that it had been a mine, not incoming. I rushed to EZ. His eyes were open but his whole body, what was left of it, twitched. The death throes. So much blood. I didn’t know what to do. The corpsman came forward, tying off tourniquets, stuffing holes with gauze, and pumping EZ full of morphine for the pain. I held EZ’s head and talked to him. I could see his eyes. I could see his pupils. He didn’t look at peace like they tell us. That’s just more bullshit. He looked scared.
“It’s okay, EZ,” I said. “You hang in there. They’re going to fix you up and send you home and you’ll take it EZ.” I kept looking in his eyes. I thought it was better than looking at the wounds spurting blood. And then, I saw a wisp of smoke in EZ’s eyes suddenly evaporate, like fog dissipating, and I knew EZ was gone. His body no longer twitched. His chest no longer rose and fell.
His spirit had left his body.
I saw his spirit leave his body.
We called for a dust off and we loaded EZ and the wounded onto the chopper, but we never acknowledged EZ was dead. We never do. We make believe EZ is one of the lucky ones, that he’s going home to his family. We say, “Take it EZ,” as the chopper lifts and departs. It’s easier that way.
Saddle up and move out.
I humped. I didn’t think about the fact that I didn’t take any pictures. I thought about something else. I thought, Did EZ’s mother feel something in that moment when his spirit left his body? Was she standing at the sink filling a glass with water while looking out at the backyard where her son played football with his brothers and feel a loss? Did she double over in pain, drop the glass in the sink and shatter it? Did she cut her finger on one of the sharp pieces and watch blood flow down the drain? Did she know it was her son’s blood? That his blood and his spirit had departed this world, that her baby boy had just died?
Did she know?
Will my mother know?
Chapter 15
February 19, 2016
Elizabeth wanted Tadich Grill to be a surprise on Mary Beth’s sixteenth birthday, but the confrontation with Beau had spoiled that part. We still had the car surprise, however, when we got home.
Our daughter, our baby, sat across the booth at Tadich with eyes as wide as her smile, in part because her big brother sat beside her. Beau had made the decision on his own to attend.
It wasn’t anything Elizabeth or I had said. His sister’s words had impacted him, and, with time to calm down, he knew he was being selfish. I was proud of him. He had made the right choice. He even had a present for Mary Beth, some gadget she could plug into the lighter of her car and listen to her music on her phone. The only thing Beau asked was that he be allowed to check the score of the basketball game on an app on his phone. Chris had also agreed to text Beau with updates. As it turned out, Serra was no match for SI this year, and no cheering section was going to change the outcome. The Padres were down twenty at the half and never got closer than fifteen. Chris’s final text summed up the night.
We sucked. You made the right choice. Wish I went with you to Tadich. Bring me home a steak. Ha! Ha!
Tadich did not disappoint. We had crab and scallops, filet mignon, and Caesar salads. For dessert we ate rice custard and baked apples, and the waiter had the chef specially prepare an off-the-menu dessert for Mary Beth, a chocolate brownie topped with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce, something she would routinely ask for when she was a little girl.
When we arrived home, the car was parked in the driveway with a large pink ribbon and bow. A handwritten sign in the back window said, HAPPY SWEET 16, MARY BETH. Mary Beth didn’t believe it at first. She was ecstatic to have her own car, no matter how many miles it had on the odometer. We went inside and opened more presents, then Mary Beth went upstairs to call her friends. Elizabeth and I went into the family room and sipped port, a gift from a friend. Beau sat outside on the patio, texting, no doubt trying to catch up with Chris and their friends after the game.
“I’m proud of him,” Elizabeth said, looking out the window at our son.
I nodded. “We’ve raised a pretty good young man. And young woman. When did we get to be so old?”
“Speak for yourself, Methuselah. I’m five years your junior.”
“Why do you think I married you?” I said.
Elizabeth laughed.
