“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.