Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

He walked between the darkened hootches, Thai and his doggie friends romping in the sand about his feet. A figure lurched out of the shadows. “Do you believe money is the root of all evil?” demanded a raspy voice. It was Wendell. “No,” replied Griffin, “I don’t believe that.” “Good. Have you ever read a book called Man Schluggled ?” Griffin thought for a moment. “Do you mean Atlas Shrugged ?” “Yeah, you ever read that?” “You’ve asked me this a hundred times.” “Wait till you get to page seven-oh-four.” Wendell stumbled back into darkness. “Wonderful.” Griffin continued on past Officer’s Row, the latrines, the squat sandbagged O club where even over the labored whine of the air conditioners he could hear whoops and shouts from within. A door banged open, emitting light, laughter, and a pair of running men, one in pursuit of the other. A crowd of officers spilled out onto the dirt gravel road, drinks in hand, looking off into the night where the two men had disappeared. “Rip his pants off, Brad,” someone shouted. “Tear his goddamn pants.”

Griffin slipped around the club, cut through the bright deserted hangar. Opposite the wide floodlit doors the planes, thick and snout-nosed, each centered and momentarily dormant within the shadowy safety of its own revetment, resembled obscene insects, pregnant dragonflies heavy with the unborn larvae of some metallic monstrosity. He entered a revetment, patted a cold fuselage, and clambered up a wall of corrugated steel already coated with greasy beads of moisture though the sun had set only a few hours before. He settled himself on top, legs dangling childishly over the side, and lit a joint. How often had he come out here to this perch overlooking the airfield, particularly in the early weeks of his war, alone, innocent, anxious about the future. He had reasoned then that if repetition could dull the meaning of a word, imaginative rehearsal could abstract the fear from the reality. So he sat above the planes and meditated on the worst. But these mental drills seemed to be directed by a strong separate will more perverse than his own. Once admitted to consciousness each scenario surged effortlessly out of control up into the wide terrors of terminal escalation. They all began in the dark with the sound of billowing sirens and rifle fire crackling far away and mounted furiously to a towering cadenza of fiery wind and mechanical thunder that neatly erased one entire grid square from the surface of the world map. In between, of course, there were running feet and taut faces the color of solidified dough and torn cries that went on and on and wouldn’t stop and then pinging silence. Over the globe, in America where the sun was still shining on yesterday’s business, people went to work and came back home, the sky was still blue, and the clocks ticked steadily into tomorrow, but today Griffin was zippered in plastic and lifted to eternity on a mud-green UH-1 flying machine. Peace. And each time he had always felt the same wet dread sliding loosely through his insides.

He flicked the joint off into the darkness and gazed out beyond the smoking arc lamps and barbed wire coils of the perimeter, out there where the night began. Three red lights flashed rhythmically back at him. They were attached to the tall antennae of a communications relay station that nested on the summit of a mountain he never knew existed until one morning when the monsoon rain abruptly dissolved and a massive verdant peak thrust itself through the shifting clouds like a jagged green thorn. The lights blinked slowly on and then off, on and then off as though glued to the palms of a triple-armed Oriental goddess who opened and closed her hands in alternating gestures of greeting and scorn. On a clear night her message was visible for miles: Hello. Fuck you. Hello. Fuck you. Hello. Fuck you.

Behind him in the revetment sat Mueller’s plane. Already there was someone he didn’t know—a muscular warrant officer with an FBI agent’s face—flying it. Strangers were beginning to fly all the planes as one by one the pilots Griffin knew either died or went home. Prompt replacement of parts mechanical and human had become a priority mission since the cancerous onset of The General’s obsession with that Fifth NVA regiment. “They’re out there somewhere,” he had been heard to declare recently, “plotting our military embarrassment.” The latest attempt at locating this legendary band, a final unrestrained effort of panoramic reconnaissance was supervised by The General and had been personally christened by him Operation Shooting Gallery, a designation Mueller would have enjoyed immensely. “Clawhammer?” Griffin could hear him screeching incredulously. “Clawhammer? The Secretary of the Army drops in for a twenty-minute visit and it’s Operation Clawhammer. What happens if the President comes calling, Operation Bootinyournuts? Who’ve they got thinking these gags up, chief cartoonist of GI Joe comics? Reminds me, you ever hear about Masher, Operation Masher for Christ’s sake, big First Air Cav sweep, even Johnson couldn’t stomach that, had to change the name to White Wing, same operation but now it’s White Wing. Holy God. What we need around here is an Operation Cream Cheese, a Project Lords A-leaping, a Mission Negotiable. All these Greek and Roman and Nordic appellations for everything from a moon rocket to a general’s fart. How about Operation Sow’s Ear or Mickey Mouse fragmentation devices or the Saint Francis of Assisi surface-to-air missile?” And in spite of Griffin’s preparations it had been Mueller who was finally zipped in a bag and shipped out like a stale sandwich. Operation Sweet Chariot. Fire Base Ringgold apologized. A freak accident, they explained. The careless gun crew had been reprimanded, the lieutenant in charge reassigned to a desk job. Operation Milk of Magnesia. And it was here atop the revetment wall that Mueller had spoken so often about “the secret structure” of the war: the huge oil deposits off the coast American corporations were already preparing to steal, the numbers of RVN government officials on the CIA payroll, the manipulation of the weak economy by New York banks with branch offices in major cities, the obvious imperialistic need for more and more markets, the less obvious but more frightening demand for blood to oil the rickety gears of capitalism. Griffin didn’t know whether any of these theories were true or not—he didn’t really care—but he certainly would miss hearing them. Out of conspiratorial odds and ends Mueller had been able to construct a habitable shack inside the wasteland of his experience here until the experience blew him up of course. It was anticipation of such an event that had kept Griffin from developing any coherent war view of his own. Catastrophe lacked coherence. Every separate day was built anew and then dismantled at night, the successive constructions becoming less and less elaborate, lonely props thrown up against hope by a weariness so deep his bones felt tired with sand in their eyes. The day before his frustration had brought him out here at the height of the terrible afternoon heat to sit baking in a masochistic stupor as the same dull planes roared in and out of a blank sky. In the dense miragelike air even the Phantoms seemed to move more slowly, their black needle noses opening flight paths with ponderous difficulty. The weight of the enormous sun softened the tarmac, its spinning stone sharpened the metal edges of hangar roofs and wing fins, polished glass into blinding mirrors that reflected almost casually the fire blazing hidden beneath each surface, the fire of space, the fire of time, bleaching out color, melting distinctions, until all matter seemed to have been immersed in white phosphorus, the eternal combustion burning and flowing and fusing the world into one scalding lump of molten light.