The World Played Chess (65)

“Sorry. I didn’t think about it,” I said. “Never happened to me before.”

“We would have killed that guy,” Cap said.

“Go get Brian and Tim,” Billy said, mocking him. We laughed nervous laughter.

“Did anyone say anything?” Mif asked.

One by one, we denied it, and we rationalized that the guy had just been a South City punk trying to impress his girlfriend. We doubted he even had friends close by. We doubted he would have fought us. We doubted a lot, but what I did not doubt, what I knew for sure, was none of us stepped up to be first. In the past, my hesitancy would have eaten at my pride, but not now, not after working with William.

“Why’d you apologize?” Cap asked me.

I almost said, It wasn’t worth ruining the night over. But that would have been a lie. “Because I didn’t want to fight him,” I said in a rare moment of honesty.

After a second, Mif said, “I didn’t, either.”

“Wouldn’t have been worth it,” Billy agreed.

“No sense ruining the whole night,” Cap said.

Maybe speaking the truth was contagious.





August 1, 1968

I haven’t written much the past month. I’m too tired by the end of the day, and in the mornings, I have to get prepared to move out. More of the same anyway. We hump. We find empty villages. We lose guys to booby traps and ambushes. We get in skirmishes and coordinate our own ambushes, but for now the NVA does not stay for long.

We’ve had reinforcements flown in. FNGs getting a lot of on-the-job training. Cruz spends a lot of his time just trying to keep them alive. The FNGs bring news. A lot has happened we did not know about. War protests at home have increased in frequency and size. Robert Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California Democratic primary and campaigning with a promise to end the war. I’m sorry he got shot, but I doubt he would have ended the war. I doubt all politicians. Westmoreland has been replaced, that much we knew—but apparently LBJ denied his call for two hundred thousand more troops. Looks like it’s just us.

This morning we were given additional time to get ready. We were awaiting orders. I took the time to just sit. Mornings are strangely beautiful, at least when it doesn’t rain. The temperature is comfortable and the air clear and crisp. I sucked in each breath, savoring it like a cool drink of clean water. I could see color. The sky awakened with ribbons of red and orange, yellows, and fuchsia. The color is always welcome. It means I’m still alive. The rest of the day I’ll see gray and brown and endless green. Tunnels of green.

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.