Gustav Hasford - The Short-Timers

Rafter Man is walking across the road. He does not hear the invisible tank. He does not feel the mechanical earthquake.

I double-time after him. "Rafter!"

Rafter Man turns around. He grins. And then we both see it. The tank is an object of heavy metal forged from a cold shadow, a ghost with substance. The black mechanical phantom comes for us, dark ectoplasm rolling in the sun. The blond tank commander stands in the turret hatch, staring straight ahead and into the beyond, laughing.

Rafter Man turns around.

I say, "Don't move."

But Rafter looks at me, panic on his face.

I grab his shoulder.

Rafter Man pulls away and runs.

The tank is bearing down on me. I don't move.

The tank swerves, misses me, roars past like a big iron dragon. The tank runs over Rafter Man and crushes him beneath its steel treads. And then it's gone.

Rafter Man likes on his back in the dirt, a crushed dog spilling out of its skin. Rafter Man looks at me the way he looked at me that day at the Freedom Hill PX on Hill 327 in Da Nang. His eyes are begging me for an explanation.

Rafter Man has been cut in half just below his new NVA rifle belt. His intestines are pink rope all over the deck. He is trying to pull himself back in, but it doesn't work. His guts are wet and slippery and he can't hold them in. He tries to reinsert his spilling guts back into his severed torso. He tries very hard to keep the dirt off of his intestines as he works.

Rafter Man stops trying to save himself and, instead, just stares at me with an expression that might be found on the face of a person who wakes up with a dead bird in his mouth.

"Sarge..."

"Don't call me 'Sarge,'" I say.

I kneel down and pick up Rafter's black-body Nikon. I say, "I'll tell Mr. Payback about your belt and about your SKS..." I want so much to cry, but I can't cry--I'm too tough.

I stop talking to Rafter Man because Rafter Man is dead. Talking to dead people is not a healthy habit for a living person to cultivate and lately I have been talking to dead people quite a lot. I guess I've been talking to dead people ever since I made my first confirmed kill. After my first confirmed kill, talking to corpses began to make more sense than talking to people who had not yet been wasted.

In Viet Nam you see corpses almost every day. At first you try to ignore them. You don't want people to think you're curious. Nobody wants to admit that corpses are not old hat to them; nobody wants to be a New Guy. So you see lumps of dirty rags. And after a while you begin to notice that the lumps of dirty rags have arms and legs and heads. And faces.

The first time I saw a corpse, back when I was a New Guy, I wanted to vomit, just like in the movies. The corpse was an NVA grunt who died in a great orange ball of jellied gasoline near Con Thien. The napalm left a crumbled heap of ashes in the fetal position. His mouth was open. His charred fingers were covering his eyes.

The second time I really looked at a corpse I was embarrassed. The corpse was an old Vietnamese woman with teeth which had turned black after a lifetime of chewing betel nuts. The woman had been hit by something bigger than small-arms fire. She was killed in a crossfire between ROK Marines and NVA grunts in Hoi An. She seemed so exposed in death, so vulnerable.

My third corpse was a decapitated Marine. I stumbled over him on an operation in the A Shau valley. My reaction was curiosity. I wondered what the rounds had felt like as they entered his body, what his last thought was, what his last sound was at the moment of impact. I marveled at the ultimate power of death. A big strong American boy, so vibrant and red-blooded, had become within minutes a yellow lump of inflexible meat. And I understood that my own weapon could do this dark magic thing to any human being. With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any enemy with just the slightest pressure of one finger. And, knowing that, I was less afraid.

The fourth corpse is the last one I remember. After that they've blurred together, a mountain of faceless dead. But I think that the fourth corpse was the old papasan in the conical white hat I saw on Route One. The old man had been run over by a six-by as he squatted in the road taking a shit. All I remember is that when I marched by, flies exploded off the old man like pieces of shrapnel.

I got my first confirmed kill with India Three-Five.

I was writing a feature article about how the grunts at the Rockpile on Route Nine had to sweep the road for mines every morning before any traffic could use the road. There was a fat gunny who insisted on walking point with a metal detector. The fat gunny wanted to protect his people. He believed that fate killed the careless. He stepped on an antitank mine. A man is not supposed to be heavy enough to detonate an antitank mine, but the gunny was pretty fat.

The earth opened up and hell came out with a roar that jarred my bones. The fat gunny was launched into the clean blue sky, green and round and loose-jointed like a broken doll. I watched the fat gunny float up to heaven and then a wall of heat slammed into me and I collided with the deck.

The fat gunny floated back to earth.

Although shrapnel had stung my face and peppered my flak jacket, I was not afraid. I was very calm. From the moment the mine detonated I knew I was a dead man, and there was nothing I could do.

Behind me a man was cursing. The man was a Navy corpsman. The corpsman's right hand had been split open and he was holding his fingers together with his good hand and cursing and yelling for a corpsman.

Then I understood that the "shrapnel" I'd felt had only been shattered gravel.

Grunts from the security squad were crawling into the bushes, turning outboard, weapons ready.

Still confused about why I was still alive I got to my feet and double-timed to the little pit that had been torn into the road by the explosion.

Two grunts were double-timing across a meadow toward a treeline. I followed them, my finger on the trigger of my M-16, eager to pour invisible darts of destruction into the shadows.

The two grunts and I ran until we passed through the treeline and emerged on the edge of a vast rice paddy. There the fat gunny was floating on his back in the shallow water, surrounded by dark pieces of do-it-yourself fertilizer.

The grunts spread a poncho under him while I stood security. Both of the gunny's legs had been torn off at the pelvis. I saw one of his fat legs floating nearby so I picked it up out of the water and threw it in on top of him.

We all took hold of the poncho and started carrying the heavy load back to the road. I was breathing hard, and the black anger was pounding inside my chest. I was watching the trees, hoping I'd see movement.

And then out of nowhere a man appeared, a tiny, ancient farmer who was at the same time ridiculous and dignified. The ancient farmer had a hoe on his shoulder and was wearing the obligatory conical white hat. His chest was bony and he looked so old. His sturdy legs were scarred. The ancient farmer didn't speak to us. He just stood there beside the trail with rice shoots in his hand, calm, his mind rehearsing the hard work he had to do that day.

The ancient farmer smiled. He saw the frantic children with their fat burden of death and he felt sorry for us. So he smiled to show that he understood what we were going through. Then my M-16 was vibrating and invisible metal missiles were snapping through the ancient farmer's body as though he were a bag of dry sticks.

The ancient farmer looked at me. As he fell forward into the dark water his face was tranquil and I could see that he understood.

After my first confirmed kill I began to understand that it was not necessary to understand. What you do, you become. The insights of one moment are blotted out by the events of the next. And no amount of insight could ever alter the cold, black fact of what I had done. I was caught up in a constricting web of darkness, and, like the ancient farmer, I was suddenly very calm, just as I had been calm when the mine detonated, because there was nothing I could do. I was defining myself with bullets; blood had blemished my Yankee Doodle dream that everything would have a happy ending, and that I, when the war was over, would return to hometown America in a white silk uniform, a rainbow of campaign ribbons across my chest, brave beyond belief, the military Jesus.