Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“What can I tell you about Vietnam? It was a good gig, all right. For most of the guys it’s their first time out of the States. They get to Saigon and suddenly they’re in this whole other world with banana palms and two-buck whores. They love it. Lots of them think that with the nice weather, the drugs, and the easy pussy, they’ll just stay there to open a hotel once their tour’s done. Our boys don’t want to fight, they want to be Bogie in Casablanca.” He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “Who cares if the locals live in hooches made out of Coke cans? Uncle Sam feeds his boys pretty well. Every night at dinner the chaplain says the same prayer, ‘Forgive us any harm we may have done today,’ and you tell yourself that’s goddamn magnanimous of him. You repeat that little prayer before you go to bed and you think America’s doing a pretty decent thing.” He covers his mouth to cough. “You meet some pretty interesting people, too.” At this he gazes past the camera intently.

“Then they load you in a truck and send you down Highway One. It’s a real nice stretch of road: no jungle, no villages, because they’ve all been ploughed under to fuck up snipers. Just mud and rubble on either side, and any slope dumb enough to be out there is target practice.” Another change of angle, this time back to the frontal view. As Wale talks, the camera moves in on him. “It’s right about when our boys are being driven down Highway One that they start thinking of some mighty convincing reasons not to be there. Because people who look American aren’t supposed to be fighting anymore, right? If you’re sent out on patrol, it’s only because ARVN has fucked up again. And the guys humping it in the jungle with you are a real choice bunch. Either they’re the ones who avoided the draft till now and are pretty freaked out at the idea of being shot at, or they’re the nut jobs who keep re-enlisting and somehow aren’t dead yet.”

His gaze drops and he leans forward in his chair. “You tell yourself all sorts of things. You grease a woman by accident and think, well, she won’t get raped now. You grease a nine-year-old boy and think at least he won’t have to grow up in this place.” He closes his eyes. “You figure they don’t even mind dying the same way Americans mind it, because most of their family’s dead and their rice paddies are bombed to hell and there’s nothing to look forward to but more of the war, so how could they see death like we do?”

Maggie speaks in the background, and Wale shrugs.

“You said you wanted to hear it all, didn’t you? I’m only talking about this stuff for you.” He reaches up to touch the dark forest of his beard. “At least I know who I am. Some people, they’d rather wait all their lives to be told whether they’re in the red or the black. I know what I deserve.”

The camera’s tight against his face now, so that even his chin is out of view. At a turn of his head, the shot becomes disorienting. There’s a cutaway to the trees in the orchard through the window. When the camera returns to him, he has stubbed out his cigarette.

“I pissed off some people by refusing to do more Special Forces stuff, so they wouldn’t even let me serve in my buddy’s platoon. You don’t want to piss off the boss men over there, Maggie—you’re liable to take some friendly fire in the back of the head. That’s when I decided to split. It involved certain evasive strategies I learned in sixty-five. Like I said, I’m not going to talk about that.” His free hand goes back to rubbing his beard. “Spent a bit of time hiding out—maybe sometime I’ll tell you more about it—but long story short, I made it to a pay phone in Saigon, called Brid, and she told me about your little plan for reinventing Paradise up here. The way things had been going, that sounded pretty good to me, so I aimed to catch the next freighter back to America.” He starts rolling another cigarette. “The night before I was going to ship out, though, I got a bit sloshed. Bad timing, because that’s when the army caught up. Somebody at the bar must have ratted. When they found me, I was out cold, shit-faced in the john.” He fumbles with the rolling paper and tobacco spills across his lap. “Fuck!” Angrily, he wipes it from his jeans. “Even once they had me, I wasn’t too worried, figured I’d find a way to bust out. Except then they stuck me in the hole.” He shakes his head as though this was a humorous turn of events. “You know about the hole, Maggie? No, well, maybe you can imagine.

“At first, they said I was looking at five years of hard labour. Turned out worse than that, because then someone checked my file and connected me to a certain guy from Special Forces, somebody who’d gone freelance and started running opium. He’d made a reputation for himself leading a merry band of rip-off artists all over that part of the world, mostly with CIA approval, but somebody in the army must have had enough of him, because they put the squeeze on me. The interrogating officer was a real son of a bitch.” His voice drops in pitch and volume. “He worked me over pretty good.” Wale touches a place near his belly, smiles, and tries to laugh, but his throat seems to close on him. His hands fold into one another; the fingers twitch. When he resumes speaking, the camera has caught him at a different angle and there’s something drained from his words, as if a part of him has gone and not come back.

“By the time they transferred me, it was the end of May and I’d seen better days. Just me in a jeep with a couple of MPs, but I wasn’t in shape for any fancy tricks. No court martial either. They were moving me to a place where they could spend some more time with me, private-like.” He takes a long pause. “That guy who worked me over, he said he was going to be there. He said he’d see me again.” The leaves on the trees through the window are still now, and shadows are beginning to creep along the wall.

“When we stopped for gas, it was pissing rain. Made them sloppy. They took turns guarding me while the other one used the can, and I guess they thought they were being careful, but the smaller one ended up with a good knock on the head. After that, it was just a lot of running. The other guy couldn’t go after me with his buddy out cold, and over there the army has better things to do than chase after deserters.”

He talks more easily now. “Next day I was on a container ship to San Francisco. Once I got there, I hitched to Buffalo, thinking the whole time about ways to cross the border.” He grins to himself. “Had all sorts of crazy schemes, but turns out I just swam across the river. Not even half a mile, not much current, no patrols. The water was warm.” He sounds baffled by the ease of it. “It was weird, swimming in the middle of the night. There were all these stars reflecting around me like I was in outer space.” He squints as if seeing it again before him. “I’ll tell you, I’ve crossed some borders in my time, and this was no border.” He reaches out toward the camera. “Then my hand touched something solid”—he draws it back with startling speed—“and I screamed. Scared the bejesus out of me.” He laughs. “Turns out it was the shore. I’d made it across and not even realized it. I walked the rest of the way.” He speaks these last words and falls silent, seeming once more in the thrall of the river’s darkness. Eventually he looks back to the camera.

“So that’s it,” he says. “Now I’m a family man up here with the Eskimos and beavers and you college-educated types.” He raises himself a few inches from his seat. “How’s that for you, sweetheart? Got everything you wanted?

“Oh, right, my buddy in Vietnam. Far as I know, he’s still over there. Last I heard of him, he hadn’t even seen any action. Apparently he was having a real good time.”