I sliced off a piece of C-4 and lit it so I could have warm water to brush my teeth and heat my C rations. I can barely stomach anything now but the peaches and the pears.
I emptied my sandbags, found the tree against which I’d lowered my pack, slipped on the straps, and used the trunk to pull myself to my feet. We started with a steep descent to expansive rice paddies, green from the recent rain with just a hint of gold. Old people, their bodies as crooked as question marks, worked in the paddies. They didn’t look up as we passed. They didn’t acknowledge me. I wondered how they go on, like everything is normal, like we don’t exist. How can they go on when marines are dying trying to protect them?
We approached their village, and I wondered if Charlie waited, watching, preparing for another ambush. We swept the village, but only found mama-and papa-sans, young girls, and children. Those not working stood in the doorways of the primitive huts and watched me with looks of fear and hatred. There were no cheers of “GI number one.”
I smiled to put the kids at ease, but they didn’t smile back. The mama-sans quickly turned them away and ushered the children inside, like I was a stray dog who would bite.
I’m supposed to be here to save them, but I’ve come to realize they don’t want me humping their mountains, stalking their rice paddies, and sweeping their villages. I’m not their friend or their protector, and certainly not their savior. I’m a foreigner. I don’t look like them. I’m not built like them. I don’t eat like them. I don’t pray like them. I am the one who is different. This is their country. I am invading their home.
We asked where the VC were, but the answer was always the same. “No VC. No VC.”
I wanted to believe them. I wanted to believe they were just farmers trying to survive, so we could move on and leave them alone, but then someone found a cache of rice. All this rice and there were only old men and old women, children. Who was all the rice for?
“No VC,” they said. “No VC.”
Someone found an AK-47.
My heart sank.
Someone was VC, which made everyone in the village VC. I knew what was to come. If body count is the measure of success, then the tendency is to kill anyone and count the body as an enemy combatant. It makes liars out of soldiers. It makes Viet Cong out of peasants.
We removed the villagers and burned the village to the ground, a village that had likely stood for a thousand years, through typhoons and cyclones and famine and disease. Someone lit a cigarette and put a flame to straw and the village was gone in minutes. I didn’t wonder where these people were going to live. I didn’t think about what they were going to eat. I didn’t care. They were just Charlie to me.
We marched them ahead of us because we thought they knew where the mines and booby traps were that would kill our marines.
I walked with them, and I thought, All this time I’ve been looking for Charlie.
All this time.
And Charlie has been right here, all around me, all this time.
Chapter 18
July 24, 1979
William and I returned to Behan’s after a tile job one afternoon; William said his girlfriend, Monica, was again working late. Seemed she was always working late. Sipping a pint of Guinness while we awaited our food, I brought up the incident of the guy challenging me and my friends to a fight. I’m not sure why I brought it up. Maybe I just wanted to hear how William would have kicked the guy’s ass and taught him and his girlfriend a lesson, like the lesson he had taught the woman driving the BMW.
Instead, William sipped his drink and asked, “What did you do?”
I contemplated making up a story, but only briefly. I got a sense William knew what I had done and that he would see right through any bullshit. After nearly two months working together daily, he knew who I was and who I was not. William, on the other hand, was difficult to know and difficult to predict, as were the things he would say. So, although embarrassed, I shrugged and told the truth. “I apologized.”
William gave this some thought, but I couldn’t read his expression.
“There were four of you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, starting to feel small.
“How big was he?”
Still shrinking. I had no doubt what William would have done. “Not much bigger than me. Probably weighed more, but not a lot.”
More contemplation. Then William asked, “Did you say anything?”
“No.”
“Did your friends?”
“They said they didn’t.”
“So why did you apologize?”