Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Once Le Thong had come for him here reeking of fish and garbage and Kraft had immediately sent him upstairs to shower. But that was when he had been angry; he didn’t seem to be so angry anymore. Once there had been a captured cadre official with only two visible teeth and a look full of laughter that seemed especially grotesque when you knew he was lying with such flaunting delight and after strangling him with a wire and cutting out his eyes Kraft had placed in the sockets a pair of small round mirrors. But he wasn’t angry anymore. He wasn’t even angry when the name Le Thong turned up at last on a list at Corps headquarters. One day after lunch Kraft simply shot him in the head and had the body dumped into one of the ARVN latrines, a dead jeep battery tied to his waist. More reports, more explanations.

He sat in the dining room, stared into the garden. Sludge oozed from the fountain. A snake darted into the weeds. He was assigned to the field again. A fortified village. Hardcore VC. NVA regulars. Probable HQ, weapons and/or food cache, double agents, hidden lists. When the American infantry received fire the CO called in artillery. After the pounding stopped, the fire withered, the smoke drifted away, a cluster of frightened nationals were found huddled between the stacks of charcoal that had been their homes and families. Kraft stood beside the CO who was radioing an action report back to battalion. He was tired of looking at so much waste. This country was a goddamn garbage dump. A scrawny sickly child, female, walked toward him, her deep black eyes focused determinedly on his. Her left arm was cut in several places and bleeding, the side of her face was burned, some of the hair singed. She must have been nine or ten years old. She needed medical attention. Seeing him beside the honcho with the bars, she must have thought he was a medic. Kraft smiled. “Holy shit!” someone shouted. “She’s got a grenade!” Bodies flopped to the ground all around Kraft as men took cover. He could see the grenade now big as a melon in such a tiny fist. He couldn’t tell if the pin was in or out. The girl kept coming steadily toward him. “Stop!” Kraft shouted. “Dung lai!” He raised his rifle. The girl kept on. “Dung lai! Now stop! Stop right now, stop where you are!” The CO, speechless, held the crackling handset of the radio frozen in space away from his ear. “Stop, just stop, goddamnit!” he yelled. He waved the M-16 at her. “I’ll do it, I’m really gonna do it!” Her hand began to move. His rifle was set on automatic. She wasn’t more than fifteen yards away now. What he could never forget were those chips of bone flying up off her face like the shower of particles from a Fourth of July sparkler and her small head just coming apart in all directions like a paper sack blown up with air and then popped.

He sat at the table sliding a silver butter knife across the white linen and looking out at the garden. The stone bird seemed to be getting fuzzier about the edges. It was losing its shape. One day he’d probably come in from the field, seat himself down for lunch, and glance out, to be confronted by an eroded length of sculpture resembling a baseball bat. Ah, but what the hell did you expect? This weather ate away at cloth and leather, at wood and stone. There was rot under everything. He raised the butter knife into the light. His fingers had left smudges all over the mirrored surface. Messy shit.

Dear M & P,

Few changes since my last note. Between the mortars and the wire probes our defenses have been kept pretty busy lately. We had three casualties on our section of the perimeter last week. However, so far we’ve counted forty-nine enemy bodies. That’s a kill ratio of almost one in seventeen which is even better than the ROKs, the most efficient fighters over here. And they’re Korean. Just goes to show you all gooks aren’t weak and cowardly. Two days ago a couple sappers did manage to sneak through the perimeter sometime before dawn, but some of our eagle-eyed boys manning the guardposts around our unit took them down with some fancy machine gun work before they were able to inflict any serious damage. Each gook had two huge bombs tied to his body. Lucky none went off when they were killed. What a spectacle that would have been and only a few yards from my hootch.

Still just routine duties for me. In between pulling guard duty and dodging incoming it’s type, type, type. So you see there’s nothing to worry about. See you in 147.

P.S. Last night one of our guys hung himself from a rafter in his room. Guess he couldn’t take it anymore. Glad I didn’t see it. Gook bodies are okay but seeing one of your own is kind of weird.

On the advice of his morale officer, Lieutenant Peary, Major Holly issued orders for the organization of an official awards ceremony. Each section, regardless of how recently it had done so, was directed to submit the name of at least one deserving individual for appropriate decoration. Cheered by the generous distribution of reward, the men would turn to their work with new vigor, cease quarreling among themselves, lay down their dope pipes, and quit throwing stones at the O club roof.

Lieutenant Tremble received word of this plan with no special joy. As far as he was concerned, no one presently assigned to Research and Analysis had demonstrated the least achievement worthy of the most insignificant award. What to do? He needed a name. The solution was so obvious he didn’t see it until the day before the deadline. Alexander. He’d nominate Alexander for a medal. Alexander, who openly mocked his orders, encouraged disrespect, laughed at the mission. Alexander, who had initiated those damn Scrabble games. What was the word for this stratagem? Yes, he’d “co-opt” the troublemaker with the mittened claws of approval. Examined from this end of the telescope, Alexander was practically a model soldier, he did whatever was asked of him with care and efficiency, he worked overtime whenever required, he was smarter than anyone else in the section, he knew more about the total operation than anyone else. And once, during a mortar attack, hadn’t he run back into the office, dodging shrapnel, to make sure the safes were locked and been cut on the cheek by a cinder of hot metal? And hadn’t he fixed one of the computers himself when it had broken down during a critical week and the technician couldn’t come up because of the monsoon and wasn’t he always polite to The General and wasn’t his printing on the briefing slides so very neat? This guy should be recommended for the Bronze Star. What exquisite revenge.

As the date of the ceremony approached, the awards desk, normally a busy place anyway, quickly disappeared under a snowdrift of applications. At night, during lulls in devastation measurement, Griffin would go next door and help Grumbacher sort through the claims. Because Grumbacher had completed a couple courses of collegiate creative writing (one effort even published in the University of Minnesota literary magazine), he had been promptly appointed to the job of awards and decorations clerk though few of his own compositions, he later admitted without false modesty, could equal the naïve narrative flow, the melodramatic suspense, the unconscious wit of those fabulous mission reports the officers themselves had written as testimony to their deeds of heroism meriting special recognition. The best of the recent batch was Captain Fry’s breathless tale of a flight for which he had proposed himself for a Distinguished Flying Cross. “Dusk was approaching,” it began, “when Captain Marovicci and I climbed into the cockpits of our sturdy aircraft and took off for that fortified area of Southeast Asia known as The Valley of Death.” Grumbacher dropped the form behind a filing cabinet. “Oops,” he exclaimed, “I believe I’ve misplaced Captain Fry’s paperwork.”