Born on the Fourth of July Read online

  “Who gave the order to fire? I wanna know who gave the order to fire.”

  The lieutenant was standing up now, looking up and down the line of men still lying in the rain.

  He found that he was shaking. It had all happened so quickly.

  “We better get a killer team out there,” he heard Molina say.

  “All right, all right. Sergeant,” the lieutenant said to him, “get out there with Molina and tell me how many we got.”

  He got to his feet and quickly got five of the men together, leading them over the dike and through the water to the hut from where the screams were still coming. It was much closer than he had first thought. Now he could see very clearly the smoldering embers of the fire that had been blown out by the terrific blast of their rifles.

  Molina turned the beam of his flashlight into the hut. “Oh God,” he said. “Oh Jesus Christ.” He started to cry. “We just shot up a bunch of kids!”

  The floor of the small hut was covered with them, screaming and thrashing their arms back and forth, lying in pools of blood, crying wildly, screaming again and again. They were shot in the face, in the chest, in the legs, moaning and crying.

  “Oh Jesus!” he cried.

  He could hear the lieutenant shouting at them, wanting to know how many they had killed.

  There was an old man in the corner with his head blown off from his eyes up, his brains hanging out of his head like jelly. He kept looking at the strange sight, he had never seen anything like it before. A small boy next to the old man was still alive, although he had been shot many times. He was crying softly, lying in a large pool of blood. His small foot had been shot almost completely off and seemed to be hanging by a thread.

  “What’s happening? What’s going on up there?” The lieutenant was getting very impatient now.

  Molina shouted for the lieutenant to come quickly. “You better get up here. There’s a lot of wounded people up here.”

  He heard a small girl moaning now. She was shot through the stomach and bleeding out of the rear end. All he could see now was blood everywhere and he heard their screams with his heart racing like it had never raced before. He felt crazy and weak as he stood there staring at them with the rest of the men, staring down onto the floor like it was a nightmare, like it was some kind of dream and it really wasn’t happening.

  And then he could no longer stand watching. They were people, he thought, children and old men, people, people like himself, and he had to do something, he had to move, he had to help, do something. He jerked the green medical bag off his back, ripping it open and grabbing for bandages, yelling at Molina to please come and help him. He knelt down in the middle of the screaming bodies and began bandaging them, trying to cover the holes where the blood was still spurting out. “It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay,” he tried to say, but he was crying now, crying and still trying to bandage them all up. He moved from body to body searching in the dark with his fingers for the holes the bullets had made, bandaging each one as quickly as he could, his shaking hands wet with the blood. It was raining into the hut and a cold wind swept his face as he moved in the dark.

  The lieutenant had just come up with the others.

  “Help me!” he screamed. “Somebody help!”

  “Well goddamn it sergeant! What’s the matter? How many did we kill?”

  “They’re children!” he screamed at the lieutenant.

  “Children and old men!” cried Molina.

  “Where are their rifles?” the lieutenant asked.

  “There aren’t any rifles,” he said.

  “Well, help him then!” screamed the lieutenant to the rest of the men. The men stood in the entrance of the hut, but they would not move. “Help him, help him. I’m ordering you to help him!”

  The men were not moving and some of them were crying now, dropping their rifles and sitting down on the wet ground. They were weeping now with their hands against their faces. “Oh Jesus, oh God, forgive us.”

  “Forgive us for what we’ve done!” he heard Molina cry.

  “Get up,” screamed the lieutenant. “What do you think this is? I’m ordering you all to get up.”

  Some of the men began slowly crawling over the bodies, grabbing for the bandages that were still left.

  By now some of the villagers had gathered outside the hut. He could hear them shouting angrily. He knew they must be cursing them.

  “You better get a fucking chopper in here,” someone was yelling.

  “Where’s the radio man? Get the radio man!”

  “Hello Cactus Red. This is Red Light Two. Ahhh this is Red Light Two. We need an emergency evac. We got a lot of wounded … ahh … friendly wounded. A lot of friendly wounded out here.” He could hear the lieutenant on the radio, trying to tell the helicopters where to come.

  The men in the hut were just sitting there crying. They could not move, and they did not listen to the lieutenant’s orders. They just sat with the rain pouring down on them through the roof, crying and not moving.

  “You men! You men have got to start listening to me. You gotta stop crying like babies and start acting like marines!” The lieutenant who was off the radio now was shoving the men, pleading with them to move. “You’re men, not babies. It’s all a mistake. It wasn’t your fault. They got in the way. Don’t you people understand—they got in the goddamn way!”

  When the medivac chopper came, he picked up the little boy who was lying next to the old man. His foot came off and he grabbed it up quickly and bandaged it against the bottom stump of the boy’s leg. He held him looking into his frightened eyes and carried him up to the open door of the helicopter. The boy was still crying softly when he handed him to the gunner.

  And when it was all over and all the wounded had been loaded aboard, he helped the lieutenant move the men back on patrol. They walked away from the hut in the rain. And now he felt his body go numb and heavy, feeling awful and sick inside like the night the corporal had died, as they moved along in the dark and the rain behind the lieutenant toward the graveyard.

  IT WAS GETTING very cold and it was raining almost every day now. Some guy was sent back home because a booby trap had blown up on him. And it was about then I started looking for booby traps to step on, taking all sorts of crazy chances, trying to forget about the rain and the cold and the dead children and the corporal. I would go off alone sometimes on patrol looking for the traps, hoping I’d get blown up enough to be sent home, but not enough to get killed. It was a rough kind of game to play. I remember walking along, knowing goddamn well exactly what I was doing, just waiting for those metal splinters to go bursting up into my testicles, sending me home a wounded hero. That was the only way I was getting out of this place. I took more chances than ever before, daydreaming as I strolled through the minefields, thinking of the time I saw a guy named Johnny Temple play in Ebbets Field or the time Duke Snyder struck out and tossed that old bat of his up in the air when the umpire threw him out of the game.

  One morning the battalion was blown almost completely apart by an artillery attack. We had been out on patrol most of the night lying in the rain. We weren’t even awake when the first couple of rounds began to pound in all around us. There was a whistle, then a cracking explosion. They had us right on target. We all ran for our lives, trying to make it to the bunker we had dug for ourselves. I was still half-asleep and not quite conscious of what was happening to me. All I remember was that I had to get to the bunker. Finally, after what seemed a long time, we all crawled down into the sandbags. We huddled together like children and I heard myself saying “Oh God please God I want to live.” Artillery rounds kept crashing in and there was a tremendous explosion in the tent right next to ours. I wondered if anyone had been in it. I continued to pray with all the strength in me that I wouldn’t be killed.

  When the barrage finally lifted we all looked at each other feeling a little embarrassed for acting so frightened and praying behind the sandbags. Outside the bunker there was
a sharp smell of gunpowder and people were beginning to move. I grabbed my green medical bag and told the rest of the men to stay in the bunker and I went out into the sand looking for anyone who was wounded. The first thing I saw was our tent all blown to shit. Big chunks of shrapnel had torn gaping holes through the corrugated tin roof and slashed through the tent like the thin stabs of a knife. We had been hit by almost 150 rounds in only a few minutes. Everyone was walking around in a daze.

  There were a bunch of men over at the motor pool kneeling around someone on the ground. I ran over there as fast as I could, my dog tags jangling around my neck. They were kneeling around a guy I knew pretty well. Mac.

  I looked down and saw that he was dead. His neck was almost off and his right arm had been severed. He had hundreds of silver holes in his face and chest, looking like little puncture points. MacCarthy was dead, bleeding in the sand, his dark blue Boston eyes open and staring up at the sky. I had just seen him the morning before on the chow line after we had come in from patrol. He had smiled at me and told me how everything was down at the motor pool. But now he was dead and I picked up my bag and walked back to the bunker, thinking how MacCarthy had just looked like a thing, a mannequin. The dead, he thought, looked kind of funny in a way, kind of very ridiculous. I felt almost like laughing and when I came up to the bunker there was the short kid from New Jersey who was taking pictures of the demolished tent. He was taking pictures with a little camera with the care and precision of a guy who should be shooting some pretty trees back home. I could see that a lot of the men were laughing and joking now, laughing and joking about the same thing. It was like the boy scouts, like the boy scouts getting all chopped up in their pajamas while having a nightmare.

  Another crowd had gathered around a trench. It was hard to tell what had happened there, how many bodies there were. Maybe three all mangled together in a heap, a bunch of arms and legs. There was a smell of gunpowder and blood mixed with burning flesh. One of the heads was completely severed, chopped off, with the exception of a strand of muscle—that was the only thing that continued to connect the head to the stinking corpse. There was nothing any of us could do but pick up the pieces. They seemed very cold and gray and someone in back of me was taking pictures. I fished around for identification in one corpse’s dead back pocket and found a wallet. It was Sergeant Bo, one of my friends. He was the supply sergeant and had a wife somewhere. He was sort of the Sergeant Bilko of the battalion. He never went on patrol and had the most comfortable quarters of anyone, with a rug and a desk and a picture of his pretty wife. He had a very young face and now he was in that hole, mangled in that hole, stinking with the others.

  The lieutenant came by and ordered the men to put the pieces on a stretcher. Sergeant Bo was my friend and now he was dead. They were going to put him in a plastic bag. They were going to do that with the pieces just like they were going to do with MacCarthy and like they’d done with the corporal from Georgia whom I’d killed the month before. Out by the command bunker they had all the dead lined up in a neat long line. They were all stripped of their clothes and staring up at the sky. Bo and Mac were there with a lot of others I hadn’t seen before. About eleven men had been killed in the attack.

  There were scores of wounded. Sergeant Peters had been hit in the eye and Corporal Swanson was lying in the command tent with a large piece of metal still stuck in his head. I went up to him and held his hand, telling him everything was going to be all right. He told me to send a letter right away to his wife in California and tell her what had happened. I promised him I’d do it that night but I never did and I never heard from him again.

  The men were beginning to relax a little more now. Everyone was smoking cigarettes and feeling a little closer to everyone else. Maybe, I thought, the men would stop talking about me behind my back now. Maybe with all that blown-away flesh the killing of the corporal from Georgia wouldn’t mean that much anymore.

  He was just another body, he thought, just like the rest of them, the ones who had all been blown to pieces. For some crazy reason he began feeling a lot better about everything. The more the better, he thought, the more that looked like the corporal the better. Maybe, he thought, they would get confused and forget in all the madness that he had murdered the kid from Georgia. Maybe they would understand the mistake of putting the slug in the corporal’s neck. He wanted to cry for all his friends who had died that day but he couldn’t. He couldn’t feel too much anymore.

  WE STOPPED going out on patrols in the beginning of the new year. We began to take showers every morning and even eat three meals a day again. It seemed like the perfect time to fix up the tent. Michaelson brought in a can of dark oil that we swept all over the wood floor. Even more work was put in on the bunker.

  There was news one morning of a big fight a little up north and we began getting restless and edgy. A lieutenant from the battalion had been killed there. I knelt over him with the chaplain when they brought his body in. He was covered with a raincoat. There was a small bullet hole in his forehead and the whole back of his head had been shot out. He was dead like all the rest, and for some reason right then I felt something big was about to happen.

  The major called me over and told me to get the men ready to move out. We were going north across the river.

  When I got back to the tent, Michaelson told me he would see me in heaven after today. He was to die that afternoon. Every one of us seemed to have a funny feeling. I kept thinking over and over that I was going to get hit—that nothing would be quite the same after this day.

  We went to get some chow and I remember the major yelled at me for not putting helmets on the men. We’d never used them in the past and I couldn’t understand why on this day the major wanted us to wear helmets and flak jackets. We had to walk all the way back to our tents and put the stuff on. We felt like supermen in the cumbersome jackets as we got into the truck that took us to the southern bank of the river. We all got out and waited for a while and then a small boat took us to the other side, where everybody else was getting ready to sweep up north to where the lieutenant’s squad had been wiped out.

  I remember moving along the beach beside the ocean later. There were sand dunes that reminded me of home and lots of scrub pine trees. The men were in a very sloppy formation. It seemed everyone was carrying far too much equipment. The sky was clear and the Vietnamese were walking and fishing. Except for the noise of the tanks and Amtracs that were moving slowly along with us, it seemed like a Sunday stroll with everyone dressed up in costume. It was hard to remember that at any moment the whole thing might bust wide open and you might get killed like all the other dead losers. There was that salt air that smelled so familiar.

  Then the whole procession suddenly came to a stop and we were told to go back. There was something happening in the village on the north bank of the river. A big fight was going on and the Popular Forces were pinned down and in lots of trouble. I ran up to the captain who had given the order and asked him was he sure we weren’t supposed to continue going up north. The men didn’t want to go back, I said. Was it the major who had given the order? I asked. The captain said he’d try to get confirmation. I waited with the Amtrac engines roaring in my ears while he radioed the rear. When he got off the radio, he told me the major had changed his mind. The scouts would now lead the attack into the village.

  I climbed on one of the Amtracs to talk to the men. They seemed very quiet. They had the same feeling I did that it was all about to come down, that this walk in the sand might be the last one for all of us.

  There was going to be some kind of crazy tactical maneuver where we were going to march west along the bank of the river and make a direct assault on the village after crossing the razorback, which was the biggest sand dune in the area. A group of us would dismount from one of the Amtracs and lead the primary assault and the other two Amtracs would sweep from north to south through the graveyard and attack from another flank. It all sounded so crazy and simple. I kept trying t
o get my thoughts together, trying to think how much I wanted to prove to myself that I was a brave man, a good marine. No matter what happened out there, I thought to myself, I could never retreat. I had to be courageous. Here was my chance to win a medal, here was my chance to fight against the real enemy, to make up for everything that had happened.

  This was it, he thought, everything he had been praying for, the whole thing up for grabs.

  There were ten of them walking toward the village, and he felt the rosary beads in his top pocket and knew that the little black Bible they had given them all on the planes coming in was in his other pocket too. The other men were getting off the ’tracs in the graveyard. He could see the heat still coming up from the big engines and the men looked real small in the distance, like little toy soldiers jumping off tanks. He looked to the left and they were all there, it was a perfect line. He had trained the scouts well and everything looked good. There was a big pagoda up ahead and a long trench full of Popular Forces. There wasn’t any firing going on and he asked the commander of the Viet unit to help him in the assault that was about to take place. The Viet officer said they were staying put and none of them was even going to think about attacking the village. He was angry as he moved the scouts over the top of the long trench line. They’re a bunch of fucking cowards, he thought. “Look at them!” he shouted to the scouts. “They’re sitting out the war in that trench like a bunch of babies.”

  “Let’s go!” he said. And now they began to move into a wide and open area. They were ten men armed to the teeth, walking in a sweeping line toward the village. It was beautiful, just like the movies.

  The firing first started in the graveyard. There were loud cracks, and then the whole thing sounded like someone had set off a whole string of fireworks. He could hear the mortars popping out, crashing like cymbals when they landed on top of the ’tracs. The whole graveyard was being raked by mortars and heavy machine-gun fire coming out of the village.