The World Played Chess (54)

We went to Village Host and relived the incident until everyone calmed down or had enough beer to forget it.

As night settled and guys departed with their girlfriends and wives, William sat alone at a table smoking a cigarette and drinking his beer. Monica, his girlfriend, was not there this night. William sat with his head against the wall, as if taking everything in. He looked at peace, but when he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, his hand shook more violently than I had seen to that point.

I took a seat on the wooden bench across the table from him.

William rolled his head and smiled at me. He was high. “Vincenzo,” he said in a soft voice.

“Thanks,” I said.

“For what?”

“Taking on that guy.”

William shrugged. “Turned out it wasn’t much of a fight.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, interested in his rationale. “I mean, the guy was huge.”

William smiled. He kept his head against the wall and took another drag on his cigarette. “Did I tell you why I joined the marines?”

“You said it was hot and there was no one standing in line at the marine recruiting office.”

He laughed. “Yeah. That was one reason.” He stubbed out his cigarette and sat forward. “I joined the marines because I believed they were badasses, and I figured if I was going to go into a fight, and I was, I wanted to go in with the meanest fuckers on the planet. I didn’t want the guy next to me to hesitate when the shit hit the fan. I wanted someone I could trust to have my back.”

“I understand,” I said.

“No. You don’t.” His statement took me aback, sort of like when he told me I didn’t know scared. “That’s what I thought, but there was a lot I didn’t understand. A lot I had to learn.” He told me about the day he rode a bus to Parris Island for boot camp, and about a big southern recruit who thought he was a tough guy and ran into a drill instructor half his size and ended up doing countless push-ups.

“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.