American War(23)

Q: Can you describe what you saw when you first reached the front?

A: When we got to the place, it looked just like farmland you’d see anywhere else, but no crops were growing. They had us set up in and around five abandoned farmhouses. There was one, maybe two miles of space between each house, and that land was overgrown with this sharp brown grass. I don’t know what it was, but it itched like hell to walk through it, and no matter what you did to it it wouldn’t die. I saw a guy out there with a machete trying to clear a path from one of the houses to a shotgun shack not a hundred feet away. He slashed for the better part of an hour and didn’t make a dent in it. When he came back he looked like he’d gone swimming in a jellyfish pond.

Good thing about the grass, though, was it was high. You dropped to your knees in that brush and you became invisible. So the Texans stationed most of us in the fields. We wrapped old towels around our faces to keep from itching.

Q: Can you talk about the night of the attack?

A: In our part of the field they had us lined up every hundred feet or so, two men to a spot. My partner was a guy from Montgomery named…hell, I can’t remember anymore. The whole night we whispered back and forth—You see anything? No, you? Nothing.

At around three in the morning I heard something like a—like when you turn the numbers on those old combination locks that suitcases used to have. Just a click-click-click. It wasn’t too loud but it was out of place. I remember one of the old Texas army veterans once said nature doesn’t do straight lines or straight sounds. This was a straight sound. But before I had a chance to say anything, the ranch house down the way had been blown to bits. It was a bright orange burst and this sound like a metal balloon popping, and then there was nothing left but a lick of fire and a big cloud of black smoke.

That’s when all hell broke loose. You could hear men in the fields cursing and giving out commands to fire, but none of them knew what they were firing at. A couple of the fighters had these night vision rigs with them, and everyone around them kept asking what they saw, but they didn’t see nothing either. Then there was another click-click-click, and everyone knew now to duck and cover their ears like we’d been taught, and then the ranch house to our left was gone.

I felt the blast like a punch in the gut. When I got the air back in my lungs I called out to my partner to see if he was all right, but he didn’t answer. It wasn’t till morning that I saw how he was killed. Those bombs they dropped on us had all these tiny darts in them, and his entire left side was torn to shreds. If it’d been me to his left instead of him to mine, he’d have lived and I’d have died. But it didn’t happen that way.

When they were done with the houses they bombed the fields. After a while I just lay facedown in the dirt and I said a prayer and I waited.

After the bombs stopped I heard the sound of helicopters overhead. There were still a few men who’d survived the shelling and now they were being mowed down from the air. By then everything sounded distant. I had this awful ringing in my ears. But I could feel the earth shaking all around me.

Then the helicopters flew low, and after a few passes some of them landed. I could feel the soldiers near me but I couldn’t see or hear them. They walked in lines up and down the fields. I lay as still as if I was dead. Once they came as close to me as I am to you right now. I don’t know if they took me for dead already or if they didn’t care or if they wanted me to live and tell, but they just kept walking. An hour later they were gone, but I didn’t move till the sun came up.

Q: What did you see in the morning?

A: I saw the dead in the fields, and the houses turned to dust.

Q: Did you see any federal troops, or the bodies of any federal troops?

A: It was like they were never there.

Q: Were you injured?

A: I didn’t feel a thing.

Q: What did you do then?

A: First I thought I’d go south back to Kilgore. I thought that’s where the others would have gone. I didn’t know then that there were no others. Then I thought better of it. I figured next thing the Blues would do is go into Kilgore and all the nearby towns and kill all the enemy that didn’t fight.

Q: There were fighters who deserted?

A: No.

Q: They just didn’t go in the first place?

A: No, they were never fighters in the first place, but they were the enemy to the Blues. More of an enemy than any of us who had guns.

I don’t expect you to understand it. Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.

If you lived in the South during that war, maybe you were never forced from your home at gunpoint, but you knew someone who was. Maybe you didn’t lose a loved one when the Birds came and rained down death with no rhyme or reason, but you knew someone who had.

Now for most of people, just knowing wasn’t enough to make them take up arms—not everyone can face the thought of getting shot or torn to bits by shrapnel or, even worse, getting captured and sent to rot in Sugarloaf or some other detention camp. But damned if it didn’t make you want to do something.

So you gave alms to certain churches, knowing where that money would end up. Or when the Blues raided your town looking for those insurrectionists they were always talking about, even if you knew exactly where they was hiding, you kept your mouth shut and let the Marines tear your home apart until they got frustrated and left. And whenever news came of some—What do you call it up there? Incendiary homicide attack?—that left a few dead anywhere north of the Tennessee line, you didn’t say nothing, but inside you were pleased. You were pleased because they up there got a little taste of what it’s like for us down here. It didn’t even the score, not by a long shot, but it gave them a little taste.