Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

The enlisted man in question, Sp/4 Monroe “Spaceman” Wurlitzer, would not have cared or scarcely noticed had the captain begun flopping about the cockpit in the midst of a grand mal seizure. Limp body sprawled in the seat at Fry’s right, Wurlitzer was lost in rapt communion with several major hallucinogens. His mind swooped aloft through a pyrotechnic maze of loops and banks aerodynamically impossible for this bulky Grumman to achieve even when airborne. White scarf gaily streaming from his neck, the Red Baron celebrated his latest kill, brazenly taunting the enemy and boosting Junker morale with an aerial victory dance over the pestilential trenches of no-man’s-land where far below antlike humans huddled sick and soiled in the wastes of Europe. Ha, ha, you wingless fools, I can fly. A cocky sneer adorned the windburned face of the aviator as he tipped his wings in farewell, good-bye, good-bye all, auf Wiedersehen, zooming off into paradise, machine guns hot for some angels to slay. Boy oh boy, thought Wurlitzer in dazed wonderment, am I high, so high that that oil spurting there on the cowling, those thrown splotches look to be pancakes all bubbly and iridescent, and that real big round one isn’t either batter or petroleum but an opening, an opening down like the entrance to a long tunnel burrowing further than conduits, circuitry, and tanks, down, down to dark places, dark and deep. Wurlitzer quickly turned his head away. Something was happening. Things lived down there. A ridiculous notion, but he knew it was true. Shapes were already gathering at the corner of his eye. He wouldn’t look. Things like that fed on looks. The harder you looked, the harder they got. He’d just sit like this even if there was a face pressed against the window, tiny fingers drumming on the Plexiglas, nails ticking like avid insects. Suddenly a hand plunged through the windscreen and Wurlitzer screamed, cringing in terror, reaching out instinctively for protection and escape—like a drowning sailor seizing a piece of flotsam, he pounced on the stalks of the throttle.

The plane lurched forward, advancing erratically down the runway in a drunken veer from right to left, left to right, before its apparently searching nose located and finally aligned itself on the broken white center line. The fuselage went fishtailing to a point less than halfway across the length of slick tarmac when suddenly the plane reared up like a stallion and soared almost vertically away, climbing on a pillar of exhaust to topple at the apogee of its spectacular ascension back into the lofty grime of a head of cumulonimbus accompanied by the ground crew’s upraised hosannas of “Holy shit!” and “Who is that asshole?”

Late in the morning after all the soldiers who worked days had gone off to their duties and all those who worked nights had settled into their bunks for sleep there could be heard throughout the unit area, if one’s ears had not become dulled, the sharp severe sounds of a body being physically abused. And if one’s curiosity had not been numbed, the sounds could be traced to a large unpartitioned hootch on the edge of the compound. The room inside was filled with giggling Vietnamese women who smoked odious tobacco, traded gossip, chewed betel, all the while twisting into heavy green ropes the wet fatigues, the empty pants and shirts, of the American army, which they struck methodically again and again upon the concrete floor, beating out the dirt.

On his break Griffin slipped out to the bunker for a quick joint. Homegrown aspirin. Back at the office it was easy to pretend he was up in a Mohawk peering down at the two-dimensional landscape passing below in neat black-and-white-segmented squares. With his hand on the crank he could make the plane go fast, he could make the plane go slow. The only problem was the missions were taking twice as much time as usual. He’d measure the same object on the negative two or three times, read geographical coordinates off the wrong grid square, transpose numbers on the computer sheets, and counting the holes was like counting the dimples on a golf ball—where to begin? where to end? He hardly cared, having been totally absorbed into the fascinating realm of carpet bombing, lost among the oddities of the weave: the not uncommon crater within a crater, Chinese boxes of destruction; the lone untouched tree at the center of a field of matchsticks; the bomb distribution games of connect-the-dots and see a smiling fish, a happy flower; and through it all the long winding road, a living organism of strength and guile, slithering among the damage, easily skirting the small holes, simply passing into, climbing out of, the big ones, interdictions often filled in and repaired before the landing gear of the B-52s thumped down on Okinawa. Trucks and bicycles, troops and supplies, moved in infinite procession through fire and shrapnel. There was no stopping these people, they took to craters like Americans to shopping malls. What wonderful astronauts they would make. At this level there existed a universe in which Vietnam actually was a planet, an entire globe, curious, resourceful, technologically advanced, a confident and impatient world launching missiles in all directions, bombarding the stars, opening frontiers, establishing distant colonies, angry little people with blistered skin and black pajamas roving long ago through the tall grass of Griffin’s boyhood and now passing outward, long marching columns, into the city of his future.

On his lunch break Simon picked up an apple and a cup of milk from the mess hall before going back to his room, seating himself at a table stolen long ago from supply, and writing his weekly letter home.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It is after midnight and I don’t know how much longer my flashlight can hold out. The shelling has stopped temporarily, and I thought I’d take these few quiet moments to let you know that I am still fine.

We have been living in the bunkers for over a week now, sleeping with our M-16s. But don’t worry, no one really expects an actual ground attack. In fact, Louie Sandoz, one of our analyst guys, just told me a couple hours ago that Mr. Charles doesn’t have enough troops in the area yet to attempt a full-scale penetration of our defenses. We have been warned, though, to be on the alert for sappers, but so far all has been peaceful except for this constant mortar and rocket barrage. Of course, not even that bothers me anymore. Over here you learn to get used to anything.

I’m sorry but Sgt. Murphy has just ordered me to douse the light so I will have to close. I’ll try to write again during the next lull in the action. Hope you are all well. Give my love to Kathy and Junior and a biscuit to King.

P.S. Remember Tommy Brown, the guitar player from Alabama I wrote you about. Well, yesterday he was killed by a stray piece of shrapnel while walking to the latrine. Please send me a chamber pot, pronto. (Joke, joke.)

Simon addressed and licked the envelope, then stretched himself out on a bright red Made in Hong Kong floor mat and started vigorously executing his thirty daily sit-ups. He had noticed lately that his pants were becoming a bit snug around the waist and he absolutely refused to sally forth from the sauna of modern warfare flabbier than when he had entered. What would his parents think?

In an office behind the kitchen Mess Sergeant Howard Ramirez sat rigid as a monument listening to the war in his stomach. Hostilities had begun at lunch an hour ago and since then the rumble seemed to have become less distant, more dramatic. Silently, he measured each twitch and burn. One could never be certain when an attack of indigestion might intensify into a crisis—the commencement of a long-awaited gastric Dien Bien Phu. He knew he shouldn’t have touched that meat, greasy army hamburger privates with only eighteen-year-old stomachs usually returned half-eaten, but it had been so long since he had enjoyed any chewable food and he was so sick of milk and cottage cheese and gelatin, meals you could suck through a straw, sick of popping checker-sized pills, sick of licking chalk off his teeth. His tongue had wanted something to taste, his jaw something to bite, and that beef had looked so good. Once again his eyes had betrayed his body. Something fluttered briefly inside, a sour belch forced its way out. Reluctantly, Ramirez reached for the bottle of Gelusil. He thought he could actually feel the squirts of acid bombarding his ulcer, deepening a crater he already envisioned as the Grand Canyon of peptic erosion. He saw a tattered army of corpuscles streaming in retreat across a rolling gas-shrouded plain. At any moment he expected to begin hawking up great gobs of bloody phlegm, to fall to the floor in a terminal coma. Died of wounds sustained in an assault by enemy hamburger. He wondered again if he belonged here in a zone where the stomach was only one of an excess of targets, too many of them fatal. Maybe he should have his entire stomach replaced with some sort of synthetic pouch. When his internal front quieted, Ramirez leaned back into the open doorway to observe his kitchen crew. “Noll!” he yelled.