by Rich Meyers
The morning dawned with that same haze that yellow murky sultriness. Dr. Psar Thmei, a surgeon who had to bribe officials for his degree, had become accustomed to the strange overcast skies over Kampong Cham, a war-torn village forty miles north of the Cambodian capital. He polished the false limbs, removing them from their plaster mold in the glass case, and placed on the operating table the bottles of anesthesia and instruments to be used in his next operation. He had no office, just the operating room, encircled above by windows from which the patient’s family could observe the surgery. He was an intense young man and wore a stained apron over pants held up by suspenders. He was thin almost gaunt, with an expression of nervous caution, with a look of fear the unsafe have after years of hiding during wartime. Very young, early twenties, he had survived the atrocities inflicted upon his people by Poll Pot and the torturous Khmer Rouge Regime.
Until recently he had two employees that worked on casting and maintaining the mechanics of the artificial arms and legs in the adjoining Land Mine Casualty Factory. The local governor, however, had reassigned them to road construction not more than a week ago. Dr. Thmei was alone now to attend to both the amputation surgery and the limb replacement therapy. He was quick and capable, doing the work of three men. Knowing his job so well, he didn’t have to concentrate on the limb maintenance, but worked steadily, grinding the plaster and adjusting the joints, pumping a machine with his feet, his mind moving elsewhere. The surgery was the serious part, very delicate, that needed his deft hands and total concentration.
Late morning he hesitated before entering the operation room to stare through the window at the long horned water buffalo drying themselves in the sun while a fowl from the lake rested on the buffaloes’ backs pecking at the thick hide. The strange murkiness would slightly lift as the noon sun burned through the heavy sky. Looking out into the muddy and torpid landscape, despair overcame him. There was a bitter taste in his throat. He felt morose and at the same time a senseless muffled fury spread like a spasm in his chest. The country before his eyes, his country, was a shamed and ravaged place without a future. Many years now after the genocide, the land was still plagued by mines waiting to explode, to maim and kill and terrorize the population. He wanted to scream and strike out with his fists and rage against the horror of childhood memories that stuck in his mind like a fishhook. There was, however, no escape from the images of harsh faces in the anguished night, those of brutal soldiers screaming at his parents; or from the haze of vulgarity that arose from the foul breath from the mouths of the men who threatened him, then only a child of five, and spat fierce words of hatred in his little face; and from the flashing steel muzzles of machine guns pointed at shaking terrified bodies. The feeling of nausea curled up inside him and the bitterness in his throat increased. “ The mines are still out there,” he said to himself. “they are just waiting for their victims.” What ugliness! A generation lost, millions dead from a confused revolution gone mad and from torture and mass executions and from American bombs, another sour nightmare of inhumanity. What disturbed the doctor these days was that there still existed secretive and restless factions, many containing past members of the Khmer Rouge gone for so many years unpunished, never even tried for war crimes, waiting, he feared, for chaos to come again and for the chance to seize power once again. From a great distance he heard muffled words that sounded near. It was the nurse’s voice he heard calling him out of his trance. The roaring of bombs in his memory drowned out everything. For most of his life his mind was stuck in painful turmoil and raging indignation was the only feeling of which he felt capable. All of this was stirring inside him, when the nurse, an older woman with burns from nerve gas interrupted his reverie.
“Doctor. It’s time.”
“What?”
“Time for Mr. Pursat’s surgery.”
“Tell him I’m not ready.”
“But it can’t wait the land mine took his leg near the knee. It must be saved before gangrene sets in.”
The doctor continued polishing and adjusting an artificial leg he’d been perfecting. He held it into the dim light with his eyes half closed. The nurse prodded him further:
“Doctor, you know he can’t wait. He’s from the committee. He’s an important man.”
“It’s not too serious. I’ve examined the X-rays. I can save his leg.”
The doctor continued working while his mind contemplated the patient’s name. The name was Mr. Pursat. Yes, he knew the name. He remembered Lieutenant Pursat as he was called by his fellow officers in the regime. His parents had told him as a young boy the names of the Khmer Rouge that might come one day to take them away to the camp. Pursat was the name of the head of the detainment center at Choeung Ek. It was Pursat’s orders most likely that began the long torture and final death of his parents when he had been hidden and then taken south by his uncle when the extensive exterminations began. “Pursat” was on of many names branded into his bitter memory.
“Dr. Thmei, his committee is ordering you to be quick.”
He gathered his surgical instruments and pulled out the drawer of the operating table and with a detached poise, placed the anesthesia jar and the mask on the table. There was a hose, a crude pressure regulator for the ether that he handled and then put back in the drawer. It wouldn’t be difficult at all, he thought, administering an excess amount of anesthesia or in fact not administering any at all. The first way would be smooth and quick. The other way, hiding the anesthesia was far more dangerous. Chances are the officials wouldn’t believe him or perhaps Pursat would be rushed to the general hospital in Phnom Pen rather than have him endure the agony of deep cutting without any drugs. No, that was not the way the doctor would make him pay for his parents’ lives. It had to be with anesthesia.
“Tell them to bring him in,” the shouted.
In a moment the door to his surgery room swung open and the patient was carried on a blood stained stretcher towards the doctor who ordered the shaking body to be placed on the table. One of the carrying men said,
“Do a good job, he’s in charge of an important plan for development. He was out in the fields near the Tonle Sap when he stepped on a mine along the lake’s edge. Wasn’t supposed to be any there not detonated. Be careful with him doctor.”
Outside the window of the room an elderly woman waited clutching the arm of a younger man, wife and son most probably, the doctor surmised, as he prepared the cloth dipped in the ether to be rubbed on the mask. He thought of those waiting who had probably watched his parents die. His mother was a secretary for the Home Office when she was taken and imprisoned in the school turned into determent center. No one knew the extent of her torture but her uncle said that her position of intelligence and the fact she wore glasses were the only reasons he knew for her death. She had received many electric shocks. Of this horror his uncle had been later informed. A surviving witness described it. Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and, to save electricity, a plastic bag was placed over her head until she suffocated. His father was dealt with more fiercely and quickly. A vise was placed to his head and turned with the pressure of three men while a wire was placed around his neck. The agonizing grip was applied front and backwards, both directions and he was released before death overcame him. His father, a school teacher, lived for several more days after the torture struggling with a head and neck brutally dislodged, twisted and horribly deformed.
The two men escorting Mr. Pursat looked the doctor in the eye.
“All right,” one said and managed a smile.
The doctor did not smile back at him. He brought a steaming basin of sterilized instruments to the table and the nurse removed them with tweezers. The old nurse was nervous and hurried about her work. The doctor had a tranquil slowness about him. The doctor ordered the men out of the room. “ Go get out now.” he shouted. As he glanced at the window he saw the faces of several young children, noses pressed up against the steaming glass, their eyes full of fear and wonder. One was a tiny girl with thick glasses, the other, a boy about ten holding a bundle of bent flowers. These children must be the grandchildren, he thought.
It was the flesh around the patient’s knee that was oozing and turning black. That’s where he sunk the scalpel as the nurse administered the anesthesia. The doctor spread his feet, getting leverage, and dug deeply into the patient’s leg. Mr. Pursat was still conscious as Dr. Thmei tied the plastic with the thick rubber clamp around his leg and tied a knot in the patient’s vein that must have felt like the cold sudden shock of strangulation. Without anger or the rancor of vengeance, rather with a sour delicacy, he said to himself:
“Now you have your family to witness your suffering.”
The eyes of the watchers were paralyzed with horror. The children’s eyes were filled with tears. Bent over Mr. Pursat’s desecrated body, the doctor grimacing, sweating, gazed into the murkiness and pain of the moment. The doctor saw the vision of a yellow cloud hovering over everything, the tortured, the witnesses, the skulls and bones and fractured air of war, the bleeding eyes and nausea ravaged by the enveloping ethers of the killing fields of dark and mad history.
The nurse whose pallid face looked macabre under the dull light that exposed only part of her ravaged skin, torn and scarred by nerve gas used by one army or the other. Dr. Thmei gave her a clean cloth. She was crying fiercely. “Dry your eyes”, he said. “It’s over. He will live.”
The recovery room was down a ramp into a cellar. The facilities were a disgrace. The world had ignored the doctor’s hopes for a decent hospital. The twenty-eight political parties that vied for power in the doctor’s province ignored the doctor’s requests for sanitary facilities; medical needs were not a priority. Working on roads, and rebuilding political networks were what were important and Mr. Pursat or Lieutenant Pursat was considered a skilled engineer, necessary for a future Cambodia that would, the doctor feared, bribe, cajole and regroup to move again somehow into a new order.
Sometime later when Mr. Pursat’s leg was sufficiently healed for his return to his work at drawing plans, he was taken upstairs and saw the doctor one more time.
“So, I will be in a damn wheelchair,” Mr. Pursat said.
“Not for long”, the doctor replied.
“You know my party will not pay the bill for this, you know, the new party will pay. The socialists will pay your bill not me.”
The doctor turned to walk away. The patient shouted: “Wait a moment!” He raised his arm to his head giving the doctor a good-bye military salute.
“They say I will never walk right again. Do you know, good Doctor, you’ve made a cripple of me? I am a cripple. Never mind, I forgive you, poor doctor, I pardon you.”
He walked away as the patient continued shouting behind him. Upstairs the family had gone home. He could hear the chink and harsh clatter of the artificial limbs and the surgical pans and instruments washed of their blood as the nurse put those things away. The doctor shivered. And he knew that soon, as it always did, the season would change and the swollen clouds would come bringing rain every day. Nothing would, however, be washed away. There would be the cold, heavy drizzles, and the land with its hidden mines would turn to mud.
by Rich Meyers
He couldn’t remember the seasons of the war. It was the time of year when the rains carried in the smell from the mangrove swamps, and in the mountains the land mines were made even more hidden under the mud, and if Jacob saw any bamboo growing he wanted to avoid the area for fear of Viet Cong snipers. His troop had moved twenty kilometers since dawn, in the mud-green jungle where occasional thickets of vine-hung trees threw a moment of shade, then moved out into the glare. The burnished dark, green jungle threw off a suffocating heat, the mountains drew gradually nearer and more distinct. While the feet of the soldiers grew hotter, sweat ran through their hair under their helmets.
Jacob could now walk almost without pain. His boot had been penetrated by sharp bamboo stubble and he walked on in silence, grateful that his wound had not come from an exploding mine. An eerie tension proceeded each step as he expected the dreaded ambush at any moment. He stared at the limestone mountains ahead that rose sheer out of the land, and stood fold behind fold, half earth, half heaven, the heaven, the stretch of vast bluish sky spreading beyond this unholy marsh of Mekong rice paddies. He was determined not to limp but the day before it had made him sick to take the first steps and he had run a fever that compressed his breath and set off hallucinations. But he had walked it off. What were they after all, these acute visions but another level of the war’s perpetual delirium! This morning the patch of jungle loomed menacing; there was an absence of the sounds of birds. Jacob had a tight, hot place in his chest. He tried to suppress the pain and the sense of imminent doom. Ambush, he thought trembling, it would be any moment now.
Jacob was nearing his ninth month of combat duty and nothing in his mind and body was as it had been before. Nothing made any sense, neither his wound nor the orders to survey the village ahead for VC hosts and sympathizers. In fact he could no longer remember what exactly the plan had been. The air was vilely scented, it gave no breath. The squalid palm-thatched huts had the hideous smell of rotting greenness. At last there was a halt as the others in the company began chattering. Approaching the huts surrounded by pigs and goats and water buffaloes, there grew in his inhalation an acrid tang. They were near the inhabitants of the village. And just at his feet there was a darkish bog to cross where flowers stood breathless still on their slender stalks. And his wounded foot that sent a fever to his brain stepped cautiously into the water. Gold murky bubbles burst, and broken stalks and fragments sunk into the quagmire. He felt himself sinking down and wanted to bathe his aching limbs and go to sleep.
Suddenly something moved into Jacob’s quivering mirage before his eyes. Then it happened. A flash blazed through him. Gunfire exploded all around him. The flames leaped into his throat as he faintly heard a command, and he tried to rise blindly, stifled. There was a flicker of the Captain’s voice.
“ Go on in and wipe them out. No prisoners!”, the officer screamed his command. Jacob could not move. He grew faint, reeled around in dizziness and collapsed. “ I’m sinking, fading. I’m not here, not involved.
Those were the last thoughts he remembered. What came back to him, what soared to surface in his then delirious mind was the image of the flight of startled
birds caused by the gunfire. He remembered falling at the edge of the bog and his eyes rising above the mud he watched the birds flying, dimly, faintly, as a man in a dream might see profoundly, yet scarcely see. And watching in his stupor, he saw the white birds rise suddenly. And of one accord over the village huts where they drifted the flock soared in mighty, eager flight into the sky. He never knew the kind of birds they were but he would not forget their necks pointed out before them as they went, and the strong flap of their wings as was as comforting as a wind of peaceful clarity.
Jacob Layton had left Viet Nam eighteen years ago, and the war that was now a long time over on the battlefield was still waging its conflict for meaning in the mystified field of his mind. Many friends from his troop were killed, and he lived to himself alone, in a tenement in a desolate American city. For years he walked the same way to the Veteran’s Hospital, down the same corridor with its lines of Viet Nam vets awaiting treatment or prescriptions for medications. It was through the door labeled Psychiatric Services that he passed for countless therapy sessions and now faced Dr. Gavins, the fourth resident doctor who attended his case.
“First, I hear the sound of my dog lapping up the water down the hallway. It merges in my dream with the image of a dog licking the dead woman’s face. I can smell burnt straw. The Vietnamese village is on fire. Heaps of grass huts in flames, broken fences and pottery and torn-up trees. I can’t get the smell out of my system. It’s a sickness inside me rising with the odor of burnt flesh rising up into my nose and a moistness in my throat. Robbins keeps ragging me. Says it’s the dead woman’s bad breath. ‘ Talk to her, Jake’, he says.”
“ In the dream you mean?”, Dr. Gavins asks.
“ Of course, the dream”, Jacob replies.
“ A dream? Jacob, listen to me. Dream, is it really a dream? Think hard. You know the truth?”
“ What do you mean, Doc?”
“ It’s not a dream, is it? Jacob, talk to me.”
“ No, it’s not. It’s Robbins. He teasing, trying to get me to get closer. You know, move closer. ‘come over here,’ he says. ‘ Come smell Mama San’s breath.’”
“ What do you mean? Tell me clearly, Jacob.”
“ Well, Robbins has this corpse set up against the well. The village is burning, everything blown away. He’s holding her up, her arms missing and her face is half blown away. He’s got this game going-like she was alive. He’s talking to her, calls her Mama San, like she’s the Madame of a whorehouse. He’s fuckin’ with us. The others.
There’s Burns and Lansky, my best friend, he’s there too. And Robbins is fooling around with this old woman pretending she’s alive. ‘ Come on, Jake. Ask her how much her whores cost. What’s that?’ he goes on. ‘ You say you want dollars. Ten U.S. dollars? Hear that, boys? You can fuck her finest for just ten little ones. All you got to do is talk to Mama here’ The woman is wasted but he’s making a joke out of it. ‘ give her some respect’ he says, joking to make it less real, all the time wanting us , Burns, Lanskey and me to face the horror of it. He wants to rub our noses in death. He wants the illusion of her aliveness. It’s sick. We don’t know what to say or do. It was madness. A mockery, some kind of pleasure or relief in the act of talking to the dead. Some of the others, not me, Lansky or Burns went along with it. The others couldn’t get us to play along. This big guy Dereks propped up this dead old man and offered him a cigarette and then slapped him and shouted, ‘ I’ll teach you pop to sell opium to these kids!’ There were corpses of young kids lying dead on the ground. Blood everywhere. I wanted to, I mean, I almost fainted. That Robbins and Dereks wouldn’t stop teasing and fuckin’ with me. Dereks went crazy and wild. He was one of the speed nuts, took uppers around the clock. He went around waving this severed arm in the air. He demanded that I shake hands with it. Waved it in my face. I was sick and dizzy from my foot wound. I collapsed in the mud. I saw the flight of white birds sweep across my eyes. When I awoke Lansky had me in his arms. We had fallen behind the others. That’s when he told me about Thu Lai.”
“ That’s the little orphan girl. The one you’re always talking about.” Dr. Gavins clarified. “ You wanted to adopt her, I remember. Was she the only survivor?”
“ Yes, her parents were killed by the V.C. like the others just before we entered the village.”
“ So the Viet Cong came in and killed and destroyed the village. Was it an air strike? Is that what you said. Your platoon arrived just after the annihilation of the village, is that right?”
“Yes, we came in and the dead bodies were everywhere. Everyone had been slaughtered-everybody except the little girl. She was screaming, the poor thing. She was in shock and that’s why I don’t know what she’ll remember. I was returned home, a wounded vet to a hospital near my home in upstate Ohio. Lansky took the girl with him to Saigon. He used his dog tags as an identification and eventually put her in an orphanage. He wrote me from Ho Chi Minh City where he settled in after the war with a Vietnamese woman and her children. Said he looked in on her at the orphanage. He asked her to come live with him. Instead Thuyen Lai went north to Hanoi to live. I don’t know why. Said she was listed on a relocation list with the American Home office. I know where I might find Lansky. He’s somewhere outside of Hanoi. His woman had sympathies for the North and it became dangerous for them to stay on in the South. She’s in Hanoi living some kind of life there. Doc, I’ve told you all this before. I know you’re against my going back to Nam, but it’s just something I’ve got to do. It’s been too many years thinking about it and putting it off.”
“Jacob, listen clearly because I don’t want you to misunderstand. Your new meds seem to be working to stabilize things. You haven’t had a bad episode in quite some time. However when we try to retrace the war events during these sessions, you become confused and very agitated. I’ve told you often before that this probing the past may not be at all productive. Frankly, there are gaps, memory blanks, you might say. You might not want to probe more deeply. The sequence is fuzzy. In fact, the telling of what you think you recall may be, well, delusional. What I’m trying to say, Jacob. Is that you can’t necessarily be able to put it together again. After all, years of stress, layers of fantasy a
misapprehension. Why go back, what is there back in Nam? A girl, this Thuyen Lai is not a little girl anymore. She may not remember you. She’s grown up in the shock and ravages of war? As a professional I shouldn’t be telling you this but I’ve known cases, many in fact, of vets returning to trace the lost fragments, years after the war. Most of them return to the states even more disillusioned. Going back again but to a broken home. Most of them say that there was nothing much to it, nothing much at all. The pursuit might really not get at the truth in the end and ultimately the entire search might not be important. It’s not my job to advise you, but you’ve been doing good work especially this last year. I don’t think it’s a good idea to terminate now. Things are beginning to loosen up, break through the darkness. I’m going out on a limb here, but I want to encourage you to stay with the therapy. Stay in the present, Jake. There’s sometimes wisdom in letting the past bury the past”
“The past, Doc? What past?,” Jacob answered. “ The past is gone. It was taken from me.”
He sunk his head into his hands. Feeling a sudden urgency, he pushed his palms into his eyes. For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. They weren’t the tears he had learned to hold back, not those of nerves pushing the edges of grief, nor those of anger turned to self pity. They were tears for himself now. Rising out of a desire to reach out from a drifting life to one of purpose, he wanted to be able to dream. For so long he wanted to care , and he could not care. For his life had moved away from anything meaningful and nothing in America after the war had given him solace and certainly not hope. In his mind rose the image of the Vietnamese girl, her eyes plaintive and melancholic as he imagined them. She stood as a specter before the gates of a ghostly life that were closing and there was no beauty but the desperate splendor of something to be set right, mended and rectified in the future.
“ Doctor you don’t understand,” Jacob continued in an urgent, pleading tone. “ I came home too late. The war was a disgrace in the eyes of so many by that time. I came back to that small town and nobody wanted to talk about it. Everyone had heard too many atrocity stories to listen to any actualities. To be listened to at all I had to lie. And after I got into that habit of lying I too hated talking about it. A distaste for everything set in like a sourness inside, like that moist nauseating smell that always followed me in Nam. Now it was because of the lies I told, always exaggerating, attributing to myself the things other men saw, did or heard of. I came home with no stories of my own. If you have no story to make real the horror and the illusion you lived, you are nothing, just a kind of disabled ghost. Soldiers need a story; it keeps them dreaming whenever they tell it. Others when they listen go into a state of dreaming. Lansky probably tells about saving my life and how I had almost drowned in that bog and how he pulled me out and cradled me in his arms saving me from the flames of the burning village. That story is his. It has the spirit of a memory that lets him feel something alive in all the deadness that he saw around him everyday. Even those crazies, Robbins and Dereks, they needed a story. Perverted as it was, they needed to play the game that those villagers were alive. They mocked their death and pretended their stupid drama, talking to corpses. A story to distract from the real dreadfulness.”
“ And your story,” Gavins interrupted. “ You want this girl, Thuyen Lai, this Vietnamese orphan to become your story.”
“ Is that what you think this is about?” Jacob answered. “ Some kind of smokescreen. Do you think I’d drag myself back to Nam to delude myself in some sort of rescue fantasy?”
“ I’m not saying that, Jacob. I’m saying you don’t need to go back. The answers are here, inside you.”
“ I don’t know about answers, Doctor. Years of therapy haven’t really come up with many answers. All I know is that life hasn’t worked out for me here. I sleep, I drift, read, always alone. I come here every few days. I find some clarity, some things are stirred, illuminated even, but I always leave here alone. I live alone and only in my head and go home without a life to connect anything to. I left part of myself over there, in that war, something, maybe a young girl, woman whatever, Thuyen Lai something I might find to get me started living again. You’ve known my pain and longing for years now. Isn’t it good for me to look somewhere for meaning, even if it’s back to the place where the mess all began. What’s the alternative? Sedatives and anti-depressants?”
“ Jacob, there’s some time, a few weeks before I leave my practice here. We need that time to go deeper, try some new things. I want to go back into hypnosis. Some amazing developments are coming out of what they’re calling regression therapy. It’s been able to help erase trauma and help transform old habits of thoughts. You’re at a much better place to benefit from it now. Through time it can take you into a healing process. You understand. We need this time. But, Jacob, I’m talking to you not so much as your doctor here.
Professionally speaking, there should always be a winding down time before ending any therapy. The word for it is closure. A couple weeks. Let’s go for it. Deep and aggressive hypnosis. It’ll work, get things so much clearer. I’m sure of it.”
In the time that followed Jacob Layton was dimly aware of the season’s change around him. It was fall and the sun sat lower in the sky and the leaves fell on the streets he walked in the city. The usual path he took to the Veterans Hospital was strewn with crisp, colorful leaves and he trampled upon them on his hurried way to see Dr. Gavins. Jacob’s entire body was taut with purpose as he eagerly arrived on time for his sessions. Each meeting appeared to increase in intensity, each therapy session viewed more revealing than the last. Dr. Gavins guided Jacob through deep and effectual states of hypnosis and Jacob gave himself over to the trance. He saw Gavins as an ally, a partner in the platoon, fighting a common war against the mysteries of memory and to gain ground in the siege of the subconscious.
Involved in the new sessions of Dr. Gavins were deeper explorations through hypnosis and regression to unlock what had actually happened in Jacob’s time in Vietnam. All the previous meetings now led up to a concluding meeting. At the doctor’s suggestion, Jacob began again to enter the fertile trance area where his unconscious easefully escorted him even though in its long march he was forced to enter into harsh and unforgiving places.
“ The fog threw a veil over the marsh. Yes, it was like a veil. It made things seem ghostlike and weird. I felt kind of unattached. That’s why I can’t recognize what kind of birds they are.”
“ Just follow the feeling, Jacob.” Gavins advised. “Don’t try to reason or figure things out. O.K. Now you’re near the marsh. How does the water feel? What can you see in this fog that leaves you ‘unattached’? Tell me what you see?
“I feel tired, stiff, muscles ache, aware of pain. But it feels good being there. It’s a floating feeling. I want to feel sadness and care like the others did, but I can’t. I want to feel the anger but that emotion isn’t there. I’m enjoying just feeling my own body. I enjoy not being dead. Lying there, floating. I want to feel Billy’s pain but he can’t feel anything because he’s dead. And I’m just lying there feeling my whole body. I like the smells of the night and the smell of Billy’s tobacco in his pocket just above where the blood is pumping out of him. He’s next to me in the marsh and I’m enjoying his smell and he’s dead. I feel no sadness or anger. All I feel is surprise. The thick water is soaking my boots and the fog is circling around me and I feel the comfort of the night. Please must I go on? Yes.
Something’s missing. It’s the whiteness. The wings of the birds are not there. They are not covering what I see.
I don’t see, I hear somebody’s voice. It’s Evers, I think, or Jones. ‘You ain’t seen a thing here, you understand’. The voice is angry with me. I am told to stay lying there in the bog. I watch everything. They die the same way we do. Bleeding and screaming and blown apart. Just like us.”
“Jacob, tell me who it is that dies the same.” Gavins quietly asked. “Can you see them dying?”
“I don’t want to. I’m afraid.Yes, it’s the gooks. Vietnamese, shot, the village burning. Name? I don’t know the name of this village. They are slaughtered. They run wild shooting everyone. They kick the corpses. They cut them. Talk to the dead. ‘Fucking gooks’ someone says. ‘They deserve it. That’s for Billy, you hear me. That’s for killing Billy Lyons, the sweetest soldier in this whole fucking platoon. That’s for Billy, you fucking Mama San bitch.’ They bleed just like us. I hate that Evers. And I hate Robbins. And Derek’s a two faced lying bastard. Fuck them! I saw it! Saw it all. Saw it! Saw!
“ Jacob, sh-h-h, easy, quiet, easy. What do you see now? Close your eyes. Feel your body easing down into the marsh. Feel the fog and the night encircling you. Easy, down, deeper, down. Now you are watching. What do you see?”
“ I’m being held up in Lansky’s arms. My wound, my bleeding foot. Lansky is saving me. I feel light and buoyant and I am spinning off the edge of the world and I keep saying ‘I’m gone’ and Lansky says ‘go along with it and you’ll be gone, you’ll be on the bird out of here’ and I feel myself being carried and giving myself to the weightlessness. And someone is shouting at Lansky about me. ‘he’s your friend’ they say to Lansky ‘and it’s our asses if he squeals’. There is a lot of noise. A kind of panic.
There was some crying and screaming among the platoon. Some men are twitching and there is moaning. Others are covering their heads and some are saying ‘Dear holy Jesus’ and rolling around in the dirt and then stopping to watch the village huts devoured by flames. Someone shouts ‘It’s too fucking late to cry now. Too late, brothers, it’s over. This place is ashes; it’s wasted!’ Robbins is cringing and sobbing and crying for the noise to stop. ‘They shot Billy, didn’t they?’ someone yells, “So we wipe out the whole fucking place!’ Dereks has his hands over his eyes and firing his machine gun into the air and saying all kinds of things about being forgiven and making dumb promises to themselves ‘I’ll never shoot anyone again’ and swearing to God that he’ll be good and promising his mother and father. Shouting out shame, promises. Hoping not to die. Afterwards, when the noise and firing ended, Lansky said something about it being over. Too late for him and the others. They were murderers if the truth ever came out but he said there was a way out for me. The fog over the bog engulfed us. I can’t see a damn thing. Nothing. I don’t want to look anymore. It’s over. Too late.”
Jacob began shaking and then stammering. He put his hand tightly over his mouth. Feeling the marsh all around him, he began sweating. He reached down towards his foot; the pain became intensely real again.
“ Jacob, listen to me. Was it over? Was it? Jacob, don’t turn away now. You wanted to go into the past. Go farther, go into the truth. It can be trusted. There’s a light there, Jacob, I swear. It’s a healing light. The past is just a story, anyone’s story. The past is the fog , the marsh. It’s a quagmire. Go deeper! Was it over? Too late for whom?”
“ Two late for the gooks. They were gone, dead, all of them?
“ You mean the Viet Cong, Jake?”
“ No, no, they weren’t Cong. They were just villagers.
On our own goddamn side. This Billy swore they were hiding Cong. This village.”
“ What was the name of this village, Jake?”
“ I don’t remember?”
“ Don’t you?”
“ No, I don’t. Those names all sound the same. Why is it important what the hell the name was?”
“ Forget it for now. Who else was it too late for?”
“ For the others. The platoon. Too late for them. They were murderers. Have to stand trial. A mistake. Unintentional. They’d all support one another and say it was a reaction to sniper fire. They’d say that Billy Lyons was shot stoned dead and they all went crazy shooting everyone. Not their fault. They’d be acquitted. “ Panic and unintentional mayhem.”
“ It wasn’t over for you though, was it? Why not?”
“ Well, Lansky said the others were talking about a way out for me. I had the foot wound, you see. And. And..”
“ The foot wound, Jacob. Don’t drift. What about it?”
“ Lansky said that the captain could arrange something.”
“ Something, Jake? What was it? The arrangement?”
“ I can’t tell you, doc. Really. I can’t. All I can say is that Lansky said the captain said he would phone into Danang for a helicopter to come pick me up and take me to an in-country hospital and then a plane would take me with other wounded back to the states. Lansky said Captain Arliss would phone in the chopper right away if.. My head aches. Can’t stop sweating. It’s enough for now, doc. Please, let’s stop now.”
“ Come on, Jake, Come on.” Gavins insisted. “If what?”
“ If I’d keep my mouth shut. ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut about what you saw. It was accidental fire, you hear?’ You see I didn’t join in with their slaughter.
‘Promise to play along, you fucking coward and you get to go home.’ Evers said maybe they should cut off my toe or two to make the injury more real. Lansky answered for me swearing I’d never say a word. I was scared. That was my secret. I’d never show it. Everyone carried the common secret burden of cowardice. It was our greatest fear- to be seen dishonorably, to be seen as a coward. That’s funny, Doc. Really funny. Men killing and dying because they are afraid not to. Men, boys really, without much life behind them going to war to avoid shame at home if they don’t. Killing to avoid dishonor. Too goddamn frightened to be cowards. Don’t you think that’s kind of funny, Doc?”
“ So you get to go home if you play along and ‘dummy up’, right? Is that right, Jacob? And they trusted you, right?
“ Some of them did. Dereks, Burns did and Lansky, of course. But then some didn’t. They wanted my promise to be a lot more solid than just giving them my word. It was Evers’s idea. The others followed along with it. It was.. There’s that smell again, that moist nauseous smell. I can’t go on, Doc. I hate it! It’s burnt flesh. Nothing I can do about it. You understand. They were all dead , these villagers. All dead.”
“ All of them, Jacob? Are you sure no one was alive?”
“ Dead! Corpses everywhere. Men, some old men. Women too- blown apart. And… And.. children. Children
dead…. Except maybe one.. I can’t…One.. Stop! I can’t”
“ You can. Breathe, Jacob, breathe. Quiet, go deeper.”
“ One was screaming. A young thing. ‘Shut her up,’ someone shouted. ‘Keep that little girl quiet.’ Then another shouted. I think it was Dereks. His hands were over his ears. ‘Shut her up, I can’t stand the noise. Shut that little gook girl’s mouth. Somebody’ Then I heard That Goddamn Evers. ‘ Let Layton shut her up. Yeah, let Jacob shut her up forever.’ I remember him moving towards me, this Evers, a big guy. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the reality slowly came in focus. Something glittered in the moonlight peeking through the fog. It was his gun. Evers was handing me his gun. He pushed Lansky away from me. ‘Let Jake become one of us. Time to participate’ Always mocking me. ‘Let him waste the little gook. That way he shares in our guilt. That way we know for sure the fucking coward will never rat on us.’ For a few moments everything is quiet. All is silent. I look at the men. They are lighting a joint passing it around from man to man, taking in deep drags, and holding in their shame and fear.
I can not really speak. I search their faces for sympathy. Isn’t there someone besides Lansky who doesn’t want me to do this thing, to take Evers’s gun and shoot this little screaming kid. I can’t, doc. Can they make me. Can they force me to do it? I turn to Lansky. He tells me it’s the only way now. ‘Just take the gun. I’ll pull you towards her and when you’re close enough, close your eyes and put it to her head and fire. It’ll be over in a flash. You’ll be doing the poor thing a favor. There’s nothing in this fucking world for her. With her parents murdered she’ll probably starve to death. There’s nothing you can do. Can’t save her, can’t adopt or rescue her, right Jake. Just do the fucking thing. And by morning the chopper will be here for you and soon after the silver bird will take you home’
Someone shouts, ‘Go on. Don’t be a coward. Do it!’ I can’t, doc. Please, don’t make me. I don’t want to be involved.”
The sweat pours down Jacob’s face. He reaches out blindly in the air trying to grasp desperately at something. He doesn’t know what. Tears stream down his cheeks mingling with the sweat. Jacob falls to the floor. He is back in the marsh, bound in the fog, immobile in the thick mud, frightened to move. His eyes stare up searching for something.
“ Jacob, what are you looking for? What is it you want to see?” Gavins asked throwing his arm around Jacob’s shoulder.
“ The birds, of course, I’m waiting for the birds to come. They will come. Captain Arliss is phoning in the loud little ones from Danang . The spinning, loud ones to take me out of the jungles. Then the big silver one will come to take me home away from the war.”
Jacob reaches up towards the sky he sees promising his rescue. The birds soaring above are a deep caress to his desperate, drifting spirit, a soft call in the darkness to his heart’s last hope.
“ Not yet, Jacob, not time to fly home.” Gavins urged. “You are still in the marsh. In the village. There’s something yet you must do, something you must finish. Do it, Jacob.”
“ I look up at Lansky. He must help me. I want him to tell me about the bird. But he too looks scared. He has tears in his eyes. ‘Do it’ he says. ‘There’s no other way. Quick and painless. Soon you’ll be gone with the bird flying over the clouds and the war, beyond duty and death, beyond this Thuyen Lai, this poor, butchered village.’ Oh God. That was the name, the name of the goddamn village, Thuyen Lai. The name of the village and not the girl. Oh, Jesus! no. The girl. What have I done?”
“Jacob,” Dr. Gavins said reaching towards Jacob. “There is no girl. No orphan. There never was. Nothing to go back for anymore. Nothing. The past is Thuyen Lai, that village your platoon destroyed. Calm down. Breathe. It’s O.K., Jake. You lie to yourself so you can be at peace. Nothing wrong with that. We all do it. You remember the things you want to be true. We don’t always want the truth, We make up our own truth. Your mind can only let you remember the things the things you want to be true. There’s no shame in that. It happened in the war. Those horrible things happened. Some massacres were reported. I suspect many others like yours, the one that has haunted you, never was revealed, never made the papers.
There was no ambush. No Viet Cong. Your platoon panicked. They went crazy. Not your fault. You had little choice and did whatever you had to do. It’s over, Jake. You have to go on with your life now. No one came out of that war without a wound. Illusions won’t help. A helpless imagined girl to pine for, a sense of purpose, and a quest for redemption. You are angry at me. You think I’m free to just walk away into my life with all its normal, distracting details. It’s not true, Jake. I carry those wounds. I’m the one that has to live with what you’ve done. After all, I’m the one that put it all together. For God’s sake, forgive yourself. Please, think about me. It’s over, Jacob, forgive yourself.”