Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Men put down their weapons and moved toward the wreckage.

“Sometimes, you know, I get to feeling kinda shitty about what I’ve had to do in this stinking war,” said the Marine captain. “Not anymore.”

The men as they worked traded simple obscenities: “Hell,” “Christ,” “Goddamnit.”

“These people ain’t even human.”

“Fuck this fucking shithole of a country into a fucking parking lot.”

Counterintelligence specialists searched the helicopter. Major Quimby’s briefcase was gone, of course. There was no sign of Kraft anywhere.

Those with the highest security clearances attended to Major Quimby. Griffin and Seeley, one of Raleigh’s new interrogators, each took hold of the bare leg of one of the crew, lifted, and began walking the chain off the end of the rotor blade.

“Make a wish,” said Seeley, smiling grimly around a thigh.

Griffin wished he had tied a handkerchief around his nose like many of the Marines had done. He tried breathing through his mouth. This was a novel experience. He had never touched a body before. It was extremely heavy, it was like pushing a side of beef through a warehouse. Iridescent flies and black hairy gnats swirled about his face. They were pulling the chain off the last couple inches when the man’s groin wound, jarred by the movement, split open spilling out a fermented mixture of blood and juice and insect eggs and shiny larval things. Griffin let go, Seeley lost his balance, and the former helicopter crewman fell to the ground with the sound of a dropped watermelon.

“‘Hey!” shouted Captain Raleigh, “watch what you’re doing there.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Griffin to both the living and the dead.

“He weighs a ton,” said Seeley.

“Abbott and Costello,” muttered Raleigh to the Marine captain.

A Marine sergeant passed out body bags. Neither Griffin nor Seeley had ever zipped a man up before. Griffin held his breath and the muscles in his throat; he was close to vomiting. The man wouldn’t fit inside, the bag was too small, did they come in various sizes?

“Excuse me, girls,” said a Marine, pushing them aside.

Apparently unconcerned that the corpse might simply come apart at any moment, he spread the bag on the ground, rolled the body into it, zipped briskly. Obviously someone with prior experience. Despite his daintiness Griffin had gotten his hands smeared with blood. He wiped them on a green army issue handkerchief which he tossed away into the tall grass. Then one of those banana helicopters came and hovered over the hole in the jungle. A winch was lowered and up went the bags one by one. Everyone took a smoke break. Griffin wished he had a joint. He rinsed out his mouth with canteen water and spat on the ground.

The wreckage was rigged with explosives and detonated. That single frame of unbroken glass erupted into a giant mushroom of black-and-brown smoke. They slipped back into the bush and searched for signs of Kraft. A second trail was located and further on a bulletin board plastered with paper notices in Vietnamese.

“What’s this?” asked the Marine captain. “Nature hike info?”

“Morale boosters,” said Captain Raleigh, leafing through the wrinkled sheets. “‘Long live the glorious revolution, the glorious soldiers, the glorious et ceteras,’ et cetera.”

“Stand clear,” cautioned a Marine sergeant. He raised his rifle, squeezed the trigger, shredded the wooden board. “Chopsticks.”

“Stupid,” replied Captain Raleigh.

The trail wound on, up and down, a twist and a turn, a path through a maze. Griffin’s body lumbered forward on auto pilot, brushing stupid leaves out of his dumb face with idiotic hands. He had seen enough plant life. A current crackled and leaped from one man to the next. Griffin was attempting to remain insulated. He tried not to think. He listened to his breath, he counted his steps. His finger was cocked around his trigger but he really didn’t want to kill anybody. The man behind kept popping his chewing gum. Griffin turned, telling him to fucking stop, and saw Major Quimby’s face blowing a bubble.

Then when no one was looking a Marine corporal screamed, spun about, and fell to the ground, tensed fingers clawing at the stubby shaft protruding from his chest.

“What the fuck?” someone exclaimed.

The corporal squirmed around for a few moments like a bug on a pin and died before the medic had time to open his shirt. They found the crossbow under a bush, the trip wire rigged across the trail. Two men had passed safely over the trap. “Three on a match,” commented one of the Marine officers.

The body was bagged, the patrol moved on.

There was a sense that that arrow had been set some millennia ago and had waited patiently through the centuries for its victim.

They swept the mountain, moved down into a valley on the other side and back again. Beside one of the streams they found the imprint of a bare foot, either a child’s or an extremely small VC. They found an old abandoned village and a tunnel system to explore. They burned the huts, collapsed the tunnels. The group voltage began to drop.

There was no sign or scent of Kraft anywhere. He had apparently vanished. “Well,” said Captain Raleigh to his Marine colleague during a break, “he was one of them spooks.”

Seeley wanted to talk to Griffin. He pestered him at every opportunity. He told about his life, about breaking a finger in Basic, about Coach Pappas and the can of deodorant, about his one-eyed dog Tony, his father’s fits of temper, his girlfriend’s ring he wore around his neck and his ring she wore about hers.

Griffin pictured himself back in the office, shading this area in on a herbicide map. He never wanted to leave his stool again.

In the late afternoon they made their way down into the morning’s field for what Griffin heard Captain Raleigh refer to as their “extraction.” Griffin felt totally dull, dirty, and dazed. The photograph again. He remembered now. Survivors of Guadalcanal. The helicopters returned. They made their way through the green sea of heaving grass and clambered aboard. Griffin tripped over his rifle, his knee slammed into the hard edge of the doorway. He limped to a seat, collapsed in a rattle of metallic sounds. He took off his helmet, wiped his forehead with his arm. The helicopter lifted into a soft orange sky. “You’re bleeding,” said the Marine next to him. He looked down at his leg. A dark blotch in the shape of Africa had taken form on the green material of his fatigues. “Wonderful,” he said.

Whenever The General came up on one of his periodic briefing visits Major Holly liked to show him around the compound, impress him with the order, the cleanliness, the growing beauty of the 1069th’s physical appearance under his command.

This trip, hoping to elicit a more elaborate compliment than the usual “Well done,” Holly was escorting The General to the flower beds he had had planted around the orderly room complete with little white fencing and tulip bulbs flown in courtesy of an old Air Force connection when The General stopped, sniffing the air.

“What in God’s name is that?”

They looked down at his boots.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Holly apologized. “I’ll have them cleaned up right away, sir.”

The General’s polished boots were caked with fresh dog shit.

That afternoon the clerks could hear the CO through the closed door giving holy hell to the First Sergeant.

The First Sergeant sent for Sergeant Anstin. “The dogs,” he said. “Take care of them.”

The next morning Sergeant Anstin and his handpicked crew came through the compound with gloves and ropes.

The dogs were delighted. No one played with them often enough and here was a whole pack of men and a new game. They ran barking up and down the sand. They leaped out from under the flying lariats, they dodged the hands, they tugged on the rope ends. Then the men got serious. The animals were herded against the barbed wire around the motor pool and one by one were roped and dragged to a waiting ambulance, the only vehicle with a closed space. The ambulance was driven out to the dunes between the end of the runway and the base perimeter. The back door was opened and, as sporting gentlemen, the people with the rifles gave the animals a running start, shooting them as they swarmed out of the ambulance, M-16 impact knocking the dogs backward to the ground. The ones wounded in the spine or back legs tried crawling for cover, their retreat blocked by exact shots to the head. The howling sounded eerily like a nursery of unhappy babies. A black and brown German shepherd, sensing too late what was happening, charged one of the men, growling, teeth bared. A burst of automatic fire removed the furry top of his skull. Afterward, the men dragged the blood-damp carcasses into a field, drenched them in JP-4, and ignited the pile. The stench, drifting back to the compound, ruined lunch in both the officers’ and enlisted men’s mess halls.