I nodded. William had told me about Bouncing Bettys. I didn’t want to hear the rest of the story.
He told me again. “You step on the trigger. Click. It explodes an ordnance buried nearby. But it doesn’t just explode. It bounces, about chest high. Then it explodes shrapnel, to do maximum damage. I’d heard that click enough to know to drop, and hope the shrapnel goes past you instead of through you. This night it missed me and Cruz, but a dozen guys at the front of the line got hit. The rest of us hunkered down, waiting, in case it was an ambush and the NVA opened up. When they didn’t, we attended to the wounded. I was thinking about how lucky I was to have not walked lead that night. I was looking at all these guys who’d been hit, and I didn’t have a scratch on me. Good luck for me, right?”
“Shit yeah,” I say.
“Then Cruz asked, ‘Where’s Forecheck? He was walking lead.’”
I felt nerves in my joints, like I needed to stretch.
“Cruz and I went to the front and started looking for Forecheck, but it was so dark, no moon. We couldn’t see shit. We couldn’t find him anywhere. The lieutenant, he didn’t know shit. So Cruz was telling everybody to be careful because if there’s one booby trap, there’s usually more. The Vietnamese wanted you to think the mines were anywhere and everywhere, so you’d get paranoid.”
He pulled again on the cigarette. It looked to me like his eyes were moist.
“Anyway, it’s like Forecheck vanished, just ran off into the jungle. I was looking at the blast, and I figured out the direction of the force of the explosion based on the guys who got hit and the plants and shit, and I shine my light up into a tree . . .” William looked like a guy who had taken a blow to the gut and had the wind knocked out of him. “I looked up and . . . there was Forecheck . . . pieces of him . . . in the tree.” William looked like he might cry. I didn’t know what to say. After a beat, he continued, “Cruz looked at me. Neither of us said anything. Then the lieutenant, an FNG, he said, ‘Someone needs to climb that tree and bring him down.’” William stubbed out his cigarette and blew out the last breath of smoke. He didn’t look at me anymore.
I felt sick.
“There’s wounded all around, but Cruz and I didn’t get hit, and this lieutenant, he and Cruz didn’t get along. He said, ‘Get him down, so his family has something to bury.’
“Cruz looked at him and said, ‘What’s the point?’
“Lieutenant said, ‘Forecheck is Catholic. Catholics have to bury a body.’
“Cruz said he’d do it, but I was the reason Forecheck was in the tree. I switched point. All of a sudden, I’m not feeling so lucky. I said, ‘No. I’ll go up.’ So I climbed the tree . . . and I peeled Forecheck off the branches . . . what was left of him . . . so we could zip those pieces in a body bag so his family had something to bury.”
William paused. His eyes remained unfocused. I knew he’d gone back to that night. “When I climbed down, I was washing Forecheck’s blood off my hands with water from my canteen, and my cross, which I wore around my neck with my dog tags, was dangling, and I thought that being Catholic didn’t do Forecheck any good, and it just made things worse for me. I snatched the cross, yanked the chain off my neck, and put it in the bag with what was left of Forecheck. Then I told Cruz, ‘Anyone asks, I’m not Catholic. I’m nothing. Nobody has to climb a fucking tree to pull me down.’”
I couldn’t speak. I didn’t say a word. I just sat there, numb to everything, while William stood and walked to his El Camino.
PART V
TAKE ME HOME, TO THE PLACE . . .
I ONCE BELONGED
September 24, 1968
I’m writing this journal entry from a hospital bed. They flew me from the bush to the Ninety-Fifth Evac Hospital at Da Nang. That should tell you two things. One, I got hit. Two, I’m still alive.
We were ambushed, again. It would be easier to write about the days when we weren’t ambushed. It seems so frequent now. We’ve lost so many guys. As for Charlie Company, First Platoon, only five of the original thirteen from my squad were still there. Me, Cruz, Bean, Whippet, and Dominoes, though Whippet isn’t there anymore either.
The NVA hit-and-runs were constant, but they also stood and fought. A week ago the RPGs exploded as we neared a village on the other side of a stream. I lay flat on my stomach behind a downed tree and sprayed on fully automatic until Cruz came down the line yelling for us to shoot semiautomatic—three-round bursts—to save ammunition.