Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

Zip.

Back at the office, he was informed by Captain Patch that the herbicide missions were being phased out. “Big stink in the press, shit storm in Congress, goddamn,” he shouted, furiously pacing over the intelligence emblem on the floor. “Only war in history lost because of bad PR. What the fuck do they think we are, a goddamn Broadway show?”

Griffin ripped his map from the wall, tore it into confetti he tossed in a burn bag as Ingersoll looked on, pretending to be shocked.

He quit going to work. No one seemed to care. He sat on the roof, under sun and moon, playing “Remember.”

“Remember the old Old Man? Funny little dude, wasn’t even American was he?”

“Wonder who booby-trapped his plane?”

“Me too.”

“Remember when Lieutenant Tremble ran his three-quarter into the side of the orderly room?”

“And the CO made him do fifty push-ups in the mud.”

“Remember the night Noll chugged that bottle of Obesitol and scooted around the compound for three days like a choo-choo train?”

“Remember when Sergeant Anstin caught Alexander screwing Missy Lee out behind the revetments?”

“Did you see his last letter? Wishes he were back here with us. Says the American people are all pigs.”

“Guess he’s given up on his political career.”

“Remember that runty new guy Trips kept on acid for a week? What was his name?”

“Remember when Wurlitzer used to talk?”

“He was smart once, wasn’t he?”

“He still ain’t so dumb. You realize you can answer any statement with ‘Check it out,’ ‘What can I say?’ or ‘How do you figure, man?’”

“Can you see him stepping off the plane in Springfield, pink shades, thirty-six strings of beads, mother hugging and kissing him, ‘Gosh, son, it’s so wonderful to have you home again.’ ‘Aaaaah, how do you figure, man?’”

“Remember the shithouse fire?”

“The soda wars?”

“The roach stampede?”

“Remember when Sergeant Ramirez started hemorrhaging, and he stood there throwing up blood all over the hot grill?”

“Remember the night Vegetable tried to hang himself?”

“He couldn’t even tie a decent knot.”

“Remember those grunts who rode in to the Spook House with the stiffs propped up in the jeep like they was out for a Sunday drive?”

“They had funny party hats on ’em for Christ’s sake.”

“What a freak show.”

“Somebody shoulda done something. Like their skin was coming off, man.”

“Remember Mueller?”

“Remember Thai?”

“Civilians?”

“Women?”

“Remember temporals?”

“Huh?”

“Brain tubes, man, something to do with memory or something. Simon thinks we’ve lost them, gonna leave ’em behind when we go.”

“Hell yes, shit yeah, I’m leaving my corporals and my generals, too.”

Up on the roof his skin darkened to Oriental shades. He looked like a California lifeguard.

Griffin’s war was over, processed and distributed. A looped reel wound through his head. A sequence of images projected onto a cold screen. The computers awaiting final interpretation.

He thought that in a helicopter once he might have killed some people.

“So now you’re a man, my son,” Trips replied.

The night spread away from them. The roof swayed and swelled and in the advancing fog the back of a beast lifted into view, the Delta where in bygone time Trips had humped for Uncle, a ginyouwine grunt who knew John Wayne was a dickhead but believed he was smarter. Recon. Search and destroy. Malaria, heat stroke, paddy foot. The screams of the wounded in the dark were the worst. Shrapnel tore off his helmet and he died once and heaven looked like a Doors concert on acid. In the strobe lights Mad Louie and an NVA regular rolled grunting across the dirt. Trips stuck the barrel of his rifle into the man’s ear. He pulled the trigger. A light dew settled back on his hands and face like the spray on opening a can of warm beer. Mad Louie stood up. Dangling down his cheek was a fisherman’s bob, a miniature piñata that swung like a pendulum when he moved. There was no eyeball in Mad Louie’s left socket. He turned and ran into the darkness. One night. Down in the Delta.

The lights of the base expanded and contracted. The stars revolved. Along the rim of the jungle, a suggestion of light appeared, a dim widening line, the lid of an eye coming open.

“I don’t know,” said Griffin, the sigh of his breath momentarily visible in the morning air. “It’s like we’re all these weird spacemen or something and everyone’s got marooned on his own chunk of rock and we just whizz past each other like asteroids speeding along at different rates, burning up at different temperatures, know what I mean?”

A gob of spit sailed out over the roof into the blue sand below. Trips said he wanted to fight somebody. Would Griffin do him the honor of serving as his second? A minute later he was flat against the roof, snoring.

Griffin awoke tangled in gray sheets, a moth’s cocoon in his mouth. He sat up in bed and peeked between the slats of his screened window. Outside it was snowing. He put on sunglasses and walked out into a blizzard of light; he trudged through dunes and mounds, down slippery roads, across unshoveled walks, nodding to animated snowmen in their magical hats. At dusk the air turned colder and he zipped up his field jacket.

“You look like MacArthur in Korea,” said Trips.

“I have returned,” said Griffin.

“Wrong war.”

“Wrong place.”

Silver needles tumbled through cold space, the glitter of tooled precision. Wanna ride? He could never pick his way through a scab with straight pin and eyedropper. For style and elegance the instrument of choice would have to be an old-fashioned doctor’s model with glass tube and steel finger grips. Proper works heightened the erotic element. Shooting up was nothing more or less than fucking yourself, in a single act combining penetration and penetrated, roles united into one entity, the circle of desire completed, the mandala of technology.

He lay on his back, blowing smoke rings, blue neon quoits breaking over his groin.

The war encapsuled him in peace. Events arranged themselves into machines of quiet harmony. Objects tended to rest in the serenity of an ancient comprehension. All things simply slowed slowly slowing except the days, of course, and the days, they went zip.

The First Sergeant received an emergency call from representatives of the Red Cross. What was going on up there? The parents were frantic. Their boy’s life was threatened daily. Couldn’t something be done? What about a transfer to a less dangerous area? The mother was already under the care of a physician.

“Specialist Simon,” said the First Sergeant, “you want to tell me now about all these letters you’ve been writing home?”

One night a tear gas grenade went off in the O club’s air conditioner, sending the assembled leadership hacking, crying, stumbling for the doors.

A deed so popular, the First Sergeant informed Major Holly, that more than five people immediately claimed credit for its success.

One night, the XO claimed, some unknown person or persons took a couple shots at him as he strolled down the officers’ walk near the CO’s hootch.

Had they mistaken him for me? thought Major Holly.

One morning the First Sergeant, while cutting flowers for the orderly room’s daily bouquet, discovered a head in Major Holly’s tulip beds. Oriental, male, late teens—early twenties, identity unknown. “Maybe it just growed,” suggested the Flight Surgeon. “Get it out of here,” ordered Major Holly.

Was that a message for me? he wondered.