The World Played Chess (34)

“Saigon is here.” He put a star close to the bottom of the drawing. “I was up here near the Laos border at a firebase in the triple canopy jungle.”

I figured William wanted to discuss it. “What did you do?”

He shook his head. “Went out at night on recon missions and watched guys step on land mines and get blown to pieces. Then we’d get up the next night and do it all over again, like it never happened. Stupid.” He shook his head, so I did also.

William’s blue eyes looked to have turned a shade of gray. “You ever watch movies where the soldier is taking aim from behind a log and shooting the enemy? John Wayne shit?”

“Yeah.” I loved to watch movies with my dad. War movies had changed over the years. Movies like The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, and The Guns of Navarone, which emphasized American heroism and patriotism, had given way to movies like The Deer Hunter, which focused on the madness of the war in Vietnam.

“It’s bullshit,” William said.

“How so?”

“You don’t aim. Not if you’re smart. You lie down behind a log or a tree trunk or a rock—whatever you can find—lift your M-16 over your head, pull the trigger, and hope the spray hits something. You lift your head up and you’re dead.”

He proceeded to tell me about his first night in a foxhole, and how the guy he shared the hole with, Kenny, climbed out and took a bullet in the eye. “Didn’t even know he was dead,” William said.

I sipped my Guinness. “Were you scared over there?” It seemed a logical and harmless question.

William eyeballed me. “Have you ever been scared?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A lot of times.”

“No, you haven’t.” William shook his head. “You don’t know scared.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You ever been so scared that your ass shakes? I’m not talking about shitting your pants. I’m talking about when the flesh starts quivering and you can’t stop it.”

“No,” I said.

“Then you don’t know scared.” He sipped his drink, and I noticed a slight tremor in his hand. “Growing up, I got in fights because I was bored; hell, sometimes my friends and I would fight each other, and not once did my ass shake.”

William finished his drink, which I took as my cue to finish my Guinness. I did and set the glass down, waiting for William to get up, but he had one more thing to say. “You know when my ass finally stopped shaking over there?”

“When you came home?”

“When I no longer cared.”

“Whether we won or lost?” I asked, confused.

“We were never going to win. That wasn’t the point. No. It stopped shaking when I no longer cared whether I lived or died.” William stared at me with such intensity I was certain he could see right through me and was looking all the way back to Vietnam.

“And that,” William said, “is when you really should be scared.”



As I drove from Behan’s back up the hill to home, I couldn’t imagine reaching a point when I no longer cared if I lived or died. I couldn’t imagine losing all hope, no matter the problem I faced, but maybe that was because, as William had said, I didn’t know scared, and I’d never faced a problem so big, so terrifying, that my ass shook.

I hoped I never would.





April 28, 1968

The supposed moratorium has not stopped Charlie from lobbing 60 mm mortars at our firebase at night or sniping at us during our day patrols outside the wire. The patrols are intended to get us FNGs acclimated to humping in the oppressive heat and humidity, help us identify ambush areas, and educate us on how to detect the many booby traps and ambush mines we will encounter. I’m sure they’re also to get us past our nerves and anxiety, as Cruz told me my first day.

I look forward to going outside the wire. Inside the wire, the monotony, boredom, and oppressive heat have caused a lethargy I’ve never felt before. The sun rises just before six—an orange-red ball that turns gold around midday and becomes a searing white globe for most of the afternoon. I can hardly get up from my rack, barely get moving, and do so only to get away from the putrid smells in the bunker that remind me of our forty-year-old high school locker room. Cruz said the temperature is only mid to upper 80s and will get hotter, but with the humidity and the lack of any breeze, it feels like 180. He also said the lethargy is not uncommon, that it will pass.

I haven’t taken too many pictures inside the wire. There are only so many shots I can take of guys doing nothing before they tell me to piss off.

The military tries to keep us alert with news that the peace talks are failing and the NVA is massing in the DMZ and along the Laotian border, but they can only say that so many times before it becomes the boy crying wolf. We sit for long hours in the shade and drink warm beer or get high. I gave up my goal of making it through Vietnam sober the night Kenny got shot. Besides, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble remembering, drugs or no drugs.

Cruz came to me yesterday and said I was to accompany him back to Da Nang on a top-secret mission. He said it was time to put this lull in the fighting to good use. I had no idea what that meant, but I would have done just about anything to get off this firebase.

At twenty-three, Cruz is considered the old man of the platoon, which is why he says he gets the plum assignments and can choose who to accompany him. He’s also tight with our captain, Dennis Martinez. They’re both from New York. Both Puerto Rican. Martinez is a good officer. The platoon likes him. “He treats us like men,” Cruz said. “And he never asks us to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He doesn’t try to pretend he knows more than the guys who have been here in the shit.”