So we're walking along the verge of a clearing in the jungle, roughly following a path, and there's this arm laying in the middle of the path.
Curious.
It's like ... shattered.
No blood, no burns, just an arm broken halfway between the elbow and the shoulder. Bit of bone broken and showing where it broke off. Fresh, not smelly. We're thankful for that part, 'cause we've had our fill of smelly dead people parts. The horror has ebbed, now it's merely discomfort and a moue when we find/smell dead people.
The guy on Right Flank hollers: "Hey, Sarge, you oughta come see this!" He's 50 yards away, but he has found the rest of the corpse.
Nobody follows up on his 'invitation'; we've seen enough of dead bodies. We have no wish to see more.
We walk on.
---
An hour later, we pass a water-buffalo skeleton. Most of us, in the Vietnam platoon in the late Sixties, are from rural communities. We've seen dead cows. The range boss doesn't bother hauling them off, at least those in my home state. The dead cows stay where there are, and they decompose, and they become part of nature. Not a big deal.
Until my pace man bends down, and out of the melange of shattered ribs and untitled limb bones, he pulls out a skull. It's a human skull.
Johnny is the pace man, and he's seen just enough of the human condition (his Aid Bag and his helmet were shot shit full of holes in The Ambush, and he survived so he don't care no more) and he is delighted to find a skull.
He thread a boot-shoelace through the right eye socket of the skull, draws it through the mandibles. The lower jaw of the skull falls away ... ALL of the flesh has been eaten by what seems to have been a White Phosphorus round (which burns instead of blasts) so it is a 'clean' bone structure .. but the musculature has been destroyed. Johnny doesn't care; he has the sweetest possible souvenir; a Dead Gook.
A few klicks further, Johnie pulls off the boot string that he has used to tie his Dead Gook to his webstrap, and the skull falls to the ground. Maybe some other wannabe American Hero will find it, and carry it home. Nobody cares. Nobody picks it up.
It's disgusting to take body souvenirs and just maybe Johnny understands that. Maybe he doesn't want to live the rest of his life staring at the skull of a Dead Gook in the dark hours of the night.
Or perhaps he just doesn't want to carry the dead weight. Whatever.
---
American Artillery is credited, in the archives of Military History, with the bulk of War Kills in Vietnam. They're welcome to it. Those of us who walk the ground ... the Infantry ... we see the horror of war. Maybe we are charged with the burden of of enumerating the "Body Count". Maybe we just see, and don't report. Maybe we are just knowing, remembering, and shutting the fuck up about it because it's too horrible.
But we don't forget.
And maybe that's the most horrible part of war. The things you can't forget.
No comments:
Post a Comment