The world played chess, p.27
The World Played Chess, page 27
But he’d sent me his journal for a reason. He couldn’t throw it out, and he didn’t have anyone else with whom he could share his stories. I felt as if I owed it to him, for everything he had taught me about growing up that summer, what he had taught my son. I owed it to him to finish the journal.
I opened to the final entry, and I noticed immediately that it was written in ink, not pencil. The writing also was not as scribbled. It did not appear as rushed. This entry had been added after the other entries. Well after.
Vincenzo,
I’m glad you’ve come this far. I hope you will come just a little farther.
The personal greeting from William jarred me. Its immediacy made it eerie, as if William had been watching me all this time, as if he knew all along that he intended to give me his journal, that he had more to tell me.
It’s important to me that you know the truth and, hopefully, after reading this, you will understand. I was nineteen years old. A boy really. A boy whose humanity, values, and sense of himself as a moral, righteous person had all been compromised. The war took that from me, more than anything else that it stole. I lost all understanding of myself, everything my religion and my parents had taught me. I had a hell of a time getting it back. I had PTSD that summer we worked together. Many GIs didn’t know about PTSD then, because so little was known about its effects. The VA kept turning away all these GIs with the same symptoms—quick to anger, suffering with anxiety and panic attacks, having flashbacks and nightmares, eating disorders, and substance abuse. We didn’t know then that PTSD symptoms can remain dormant for years, until triggered by an event. I don’t know what triggered mine. Everything, I guess.
In Vietnam, killing became very impersonal. We never called the people “Vietnamese.” They were “VC” or “Gooks,” “Chinks” or “Charlie.” You didn’t feel like you were killing a person, though of course you knew you were. Much of the time outside the wire, you didn’t see the guy you shot, so we told ourselves we didn’t kill anyone. At least I did. Those times you did see the bodies, you told yourself it wasn’t a bullet from your rifle. It was someone else’s bullet. You didn’t really know.
Except I did.
One time.
It haunts me.
I told you the story. But not the whole story. You deserve to hear the whole story. The real story. The truth. I hope you will understand. I hope you will forgive me.
I set the journal down and I looked beyond the ring of light cast by the lamp, toward the hall that led to the bedroom where Elizabeth watched her show. I thought I wanted to read William’s journal alone, with just him, as had often been the case over the past year.
Now, I wasn’t so sure.
The lamp shone like a lone streetlamp on a deserted street. But for flashes of blue television light on the hall wall, the rest of the room, and the house, was dark. And the dark had always scared me. I didn’t know why. It was one of those weird things. Even in my own home, the place I had lived for two decades, the darkness caused my imagination to flare and, at times, to run wild. I thought it was just an idiosyncrasy, but one night when I went to shut off the hall light, Mary Beth called out to me from her room. “Can you leave it on?”
“Why?” I asked, peering in the door.
“It’s my night-light,” she said. “I’m afraid of the dark.”
So maybe it was a genetic fear. All I know is that I would have been terrified in Vietnam, as William described the night, in darkness so black you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. But I knew it wasn’t the darkness that scared me this night. I was scared about what awaited me on the final pages of William’s journal, what he called “the real story” and “the truth.” I worried about why he hoped I would forgive him.
I wondered if anyone else knew what I was about to read. Had William’s wife known? Perhaps. A close friend, doubtful. Everyone’s past contains things we are not proud of, skeletons in our closets that we do not share, not with strangers and not with those we love and who love us. We fear that to do so will change their perception of us, and their belief in who we are.
But William didn’t really know me in 1979 when we worked together, not in any detail, and over this past year, as I read his journal, I wondered if that was why William had told me about Vietnam, why he shared his journal with me. I was not his spouse or his friend. I was not even his peer. The journal would not color my perception of him because, like Beau and his freshman roommate—by chance paired together for nine months—William and I had been paired together by chance and we would never see one another again.
I went back to the journal.
We were on patrol December 12, 1968. We were told to take this hill, secure it, and turn it over to the ARVN. Hill 1338. I will forever remember the number.
We’d humped all day. Usually we cut our own path to avoid the land mines. Alpha Company took point. Charlie Company, my company, was in the rear. It was just me and Victor now. Bean had rotated back home. Forecheck was dead, and Whippet had been injured and sent home.
Cruz wasn’t supposed to be with me. He was a short-timer—under a month before his DEROS. He was supposed to be on a Huey headed to Da Nang to file papers and avoid paper cuts before he shipped home. He wasn’t supposed to be on a lurp. He was there because of me. He was there because I turned down the clerk’s job at Da Nang that he had set up for me, because I had come back for him, so we could leave the bush together. He was out in the bush because of me.
As we humped, I kept my gaze down, searching for booby traps. I was worried, but more so for Cruz. Every step he took, I expected it to be his last. I expected to hear a boom and then nothing.
Cruz would just be gone.
As we humped, Cruz kept talking about going home to Spanish Harlem, about me coming to meet his huge family. He kept saying we were going to eat Puerto Rican food until we threw up, then go to the clubs and dance with the senoritas until morning, then do it all over again. I couldn’t understand why he was breaking his first rule—don’t talk about home in the bush—and I kept telling Cruz to shut up, to not talk about home. But he wouldn’t let up. He kept describing the party until I could see it in my head and taste and smell the food. I could also see the senoritas. I could see their tanned skin, dark eyes, the sexiness of their hips and their calves, the curve of their breasts beneath their sweaters. I could smell their perfume and feel their bodies up against mine, their fingers playing with my hair. It was one of the most vivid visions I’d had of home since I arrived in Vietnam, and though I tried, I couldn’t push the vision from my mind.
The terrain steepened. The trail became thick with vegetation. It had rained hard the prior night and early that morning. Seemed like it always rained now. We all had trouble getting our footing. The red mud-clay was, at times, up to our ankles. Alpha Company went up the hill at roughly four p.m. I figured we’d make it to the top and set our perimeter. We’d dig in. In the morning we’d turn the hill over to the ARVN and leave.
What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that an entire NVA battalion, an estimated five hundred men, were dug in atop the hill and along the southern side—a reverse L. It is a classic ambush tactic, and we were in the kill zone.
AK-47s opened up on Alpha Company along with rocket-propelled grenades. The NVA knew we had superior firepower and superior air support, so it waited until we got to terrain where the APCs and the tanks couldn’t help us, couldn’t come up the hill. It waited until we got so close we could see one another. Too close to call in air support.
It was a brawl. A street fight.
Machine guns tore up the jungle, cut down men and plants. RPGs exploded. Alpha Company never even had time to drop their packs. We could hear the wounded wailing, but every time men were sent up the hill, the NVA cut them down. We couldn’t overwhelm them with superior firepower, not this time. We were trained to fight our way through the ambush, but without the firepower, without footing, that was a futile act.
At dusk the NVA didn’t evaporate into the bush. They continued to fight.
They fought all night. Charlie Company tried, but we couldn’t get up the mountain, couldn’t reach the dead and the wounded. I hunkered down halfway up the hill and expected Cruz to hunker down beside me. He was going home, to the party, to the food, to the senoritas. But Cruz wouldn’t hunker down.
“I’m going up, Shutter,” he said to me.
“What?” I shouted. “No. No you’ll die.”
“We all have to die.”
“No,” I said. Then I broke the first lesson. “We’re going home to New York. We’re going to eat your mother’s cooking and dance with the senoritas in the clubs.”
Cruz smiled. “It’s not real, Shutter.”
“What?”
“I made it up.” He shrugged. “My mother died of breast cancer when I was twelve. My father is in prison. It was a blessing. He used to get drunk and beat me and my brothers. I didn’t get drafted. I volunteered at seventeen to get out of there, and I reupped ’cause there’s no place for me to go. There is no home. This is home now. The marines are my home.”
I was trying to process this, trying to understand it, but I couldn’t, not with the battle raging.
“What about the senoritas?” I asked. “What about dancing until dawn?”
“I can’t go home, Shutter. If I go home, the gangs will kill me. I’ll be unemployed. I’ll have to deal drugs and I’ll end up in prison like my father, if not a grave.”
“You can come to New Jersey,” I said. “My mother will cook for us and we’ll go to the clubs in New York.”
Cruz smiled. “I got to go up that hill, Shutter. I’m a marine. I have to bust through.”
“Then I’m going with you.”
“No,” Cruz said. “You have a family. You have a home. You have a mother and father who care. That’s why I made up all that stuff, so you didn’t lose sight of going home.”
“I’m coming,” I said.
I turned for my rifle and helmet, and Cruz hit me in the back of the head with the stock of his M-16. At least that’s what I later deduced. By the time I came to, he’d gone up the hill.
By dawn the NVA had evaporated back into the bush. We found thousands of spent rounds but we didn’t find a single NVA body. Not one. Alpha Company went up that hill with 137 men. Seventy-six died. Forty-three were seriously wounded. Most of the dead were shot in the head at close range. Ears were missing. Eyes had been gouged out. Ring fingers had been severed. Charlie Company lost seven men and had another ten wounded.
Those of us still alive crawled out of our foxholes stunned and dazed. The jungle looked like a huge blaze had burned through it. The foliage had evaporated, and ash blew in the breeze and fluttered to the ground like dirty snowflakes. It was hard to breathe; the air was toxic. Bodies lay scattered everywhere. Marines were putting them in body bags and lining them up for transport.
I looked for Cruz. The soot and dirt and sweat had changed their faces; I didn’t recognize anyone. I wondered if I was somehow in the wrong place, if a bomb had blown me to another hilltop. I had to stop and look each marine in the eye, try to put a name with a face. I had to ask, “Cruz?”
They shook their heads.
I moved on.
When I couldn’t find Cruz among the living, I searched the dead. I searched the bodies being put in body bags. Cruz was not among them.
The top of the hill was barren. No buildings. No bunkers. No foliage. Charcoal sticks and craters remained from the many bombings over the many months. Just one marine lay atop the mountain. Just one marine reached the top. Just one had punched through.
Victor Cruz.
His eyes were closed. He looked at peace, like he had lain down to sleep. He had all his limbs. I didn’t see bullet holes in his body. I thought maybe he wasn’t dead. I hoped he’d just been knocked out, that the bombing knocked him out. I patted his cheek, at first just a tap. Then harder.
“Wake up,” I pled. “Wake up or they’re going to ship you home with the dead.”
But Cruz didn’t wake up. He didn’t open his eyes.
Marines grabbed my arm to stop me from hitting him. I broke free and I sat down beside him.
Cruz took the hill.
He made it to the top.
And that’s where he died.
I removed his dog tag and the contents of his vest, and I put them in a plastic bag that I taped to his wrist. For who? I don’t know. I helped put him in a body bag and I whispered, “I hope you’re home, at a party, that you eat until you puke, and you dance until the sun comes up. And I hope you do it again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.”
Then I zipped the bag closed.
I looked up from William’s journal entry into the darkness of the room, and I wiped the tears from my eyes. I thought of William, of the story he told me that final day at the remodel. He told me he chose not to go up the hill with Cruz, and I had always thought that was why he felt guilt, why he could not leave the war behind. I thought of my son, at the Dodger game, telling me he thought he should have been in the car with Chris.
But now William had said that wasn’t what happened, and I was wondering, Did Cruz actually knock William out? Or was that just what William wanted me to believe, so I didn’t think poorly of him for not going up the hill?
But why would William care now?
Even if it were true, if Cruz knocked William out, why then would William have felt so much guilt to have survived? I looked back to the journal and turned the page. There was one more entry, also freshly written. Also in ink. But there was no new date.
The story continued, and so did I.
After the bodies were helicoptered out, we climbed down the hill. The ARVN, the South Vietnamese, never came. At dusk we took a short break in a field of rice paddies.
I sat alone, the only remaining marine left from my original squad. Nearby sat three marines smoking a joint. They shook their heads. “Shutter,” they said. “Take our picture.”
I was not thinking much anymore. I’d forgotten I still had the camera. I raised it and snapped their photo. They had soot and dirt in every crack of their visible skin, which otherwise had no pigmentation. It was gray. They didn’t look like men. They looked like ghosts, walking dead. They didn’t smile. Though only in-country a couple of months, they already had the lifeless eyes I’d seen in so many marines, like their souls had already left their bodies—the way EZ’s soul left his body.
One of them pointed across the paddy. Far in the distance a mama-san was bent over, working in the shin-deep water as if it were just another day. We’d just lost all these marines. We’d lost Victor Cruz. And she just went on with her life, like nothing happened. The guys watched her from across the paddy. One of them, I don’t remember who, it doesn’t matter, said, “I’ll bet Mama-san is VC.”
“Sure as shit,” said another. “They’re all VC. I’ll bet she gave us away, gave the NVA time to ambush us.”
I looked up and saw her in the distance, small and fragile, just a shadow really, her cone-shaped hat and white shirt against the fading light.
“What do you want to bet I can hit her?” one of the guys said.
I heard someone say, “Don’t bother. You’re just wasting ammunition.” And I realized it was me. I was not thinking, This is an innocent woman. I was thinking we shouldn’t waste ammunition.
The first guy took a shot. Mama-san never looked up. She never looked over. She just kept working.
The second guy shouldered his rifle, shot. Missed.
The third guy also missed.
They looked to me. Like I was one of them. But I was not one of them. I was not like them. I was not going to shoot at an old woman.
I looked to the old woman, and suddenly I was hovering over this shell of a marine I no longer recognized, this marine I did not know. I watched as he raised the barrel of his M-16 and put the stock to his shoulder. He’s not going to pull the trigger, I told myself. He was just going to put the sights on her and pretend to pull the trigger. He was not going to shoot an innocent woman.
She was a dark shape against the fading light and the red horizon. Too far. She was too far to hit.
He squeezed the trigger.
The old woman fell over.
I lowered the rifle and looked to the three soldiers. No one said anything. No one’s facial expression changed. They stood and fell out, humping across the rice paddies, past the old woman’s body. As we passed, they never looked over at her. They didn’t care.
But I looked.
I saw the face.
Not an old mama-san. A boy. Maybe seven or eight years old. A child.
His eyes were open, staring up at me, pleading for an answer. Why?
I had no answer.
I didn’t know why.
I see that young boy’s face every day.
He walks down the streets I walk, sits in a passing car, plays soccer on the soccer fields with other kids. He eats in the booth next to me in restaurants, sits in the movie theaters I attend, stands in line when I wait for anything. I see him at night when I close my eyes. I see him in the morning when I wake. I see him in the shower and in the mirror when I shave.
He is death.
Death follows me.
The young boy haunts me. He has a right.
I took his life.
He’s taking mine.
Chapter 26
June 17, 2017
I drove down to Los Angeles to pick up Beau after he completed his first year at UCLA. There had been some talk of him staying in LA, about a job working with a friend at a golf course, but ultimately, Beau decided he wanted to come home. Elizabeth had too much going on at work to make the drive, and with Mary Beth still in finals, we thought it best that Elizabeth stay home and keep Mary Beth on track.
I helped Beau carry his belongings to the car. It wasn’t much. I was amazed at how little one could live on, the simplicity of college life. It made me think of William again, what little he had in Vietnam. Beau’s freshman roommate, whom I had never met, had already checked out, leaving just the elevated bare mattress and pinholes in the wall where the Star Wars movie posters had hung.
