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There’s the way it oughta be, and there’s the way it is.
—Sergeant Barnes, Platoon…Still, this is how it’s done:
This is a war....
—Randall Jarrell, “Eighth Air Force”
[1. What d’y’all know about death?]
Down deep, at the bottom of their bunker in base camp, Rhah is snarling, “You ain’t never been right, about nothin’!”
Elias has been dead almost two days now. Chris, picking up the dope pipe to steady his nerves, feels a flash of irony when he looks around the bunker with its steep packed walls like a crypt: that they’ve buried themselves and left Elias behind. You don’t leave a man behind, that’s the tacit law. Except they did.
He ought to ask Rhah about that. If being right or being wrong really means jackshit here, with the blurred scent of the weed already going to their heads and Elias going to rot somewhere in the heat of the bush. But as he turns, he sees Barnes in the doorway, leaning on the wooden frame. Barnes standing up, slightly lopsided, as if his drunkenness is a weight that makes him list. Barnes moving in, bright with sweat, smelling of Jack Daniels and violence and the lust that goes with both.
“Y’all know ’bout killin’?” he asks.
In that moment, Chris does. Maybe it’s just the smoke, but the room seems to narrow in on them, Barnes and him, Barnes moving around him evenly. “Y’all loved ’lias,” Barnes says. That’s when Chris knows: how Barnes killed Elias and how he must kill Barnes, a linear progression.
He’s on Barnes so fast it's unthinking, but Barnes has him off-balance almost as soon as they engage. Chris lashes out wildly, thinking, Six against one, it’s supposed to be six against one. But as a blur on the edges of his vision he sees that the others haven’t moved, and there might as well be six men against him, half a dozen demons he thought he’d left out in the field. Gardner, lying flabby and white with his mouth lolling. Sal, fountaining blood. Manny, tacked up on a tree like a trophy trout. A Vietnamese cripple, swaying on his one good leg. Lerner, left to Doc in the rain. Elias, with that expression halfway between grimace and grin.
(When they came out of the jungle that last time, the chopper that came for them also carried a body, a tarp-covered lump behind them, identifiable only by smell. Chris stared at it for the entire ride. It swam in and out of focus, became Elias doubled over himself, then just a long vague bulge again. As they landed at base camp, the door gunner leaned over to Chris and said with a smile stretched too tight, “You ride with a dead man once, he gonna ride with you forever.”)
Barnes, with his thirty extra pounds and undiluted muscle, is on top of him now. The heat and the pot confuse Chris: for a moment he feels as Elias must have, that afternoon in the village, as though he fights a force as inexorable as gravity. The keen blade of Barnes’s knife edges up under his jaw, pinning him back into himself. Over the ricochet of his pulse he can barely hear the others bargaining for his life overhead.
Barnes’s grip relaxes incrementally, and his knife comes down and nicks open the flesh beneath Chris’s eye like a brand. Shock and shame flood through Chris as Barnes moves off.
“What d’y’all know about death?” Barnes says, framed by the door, looking at Chris and the mark he has left.
Maybe Chris thinks, as he gets to his feet, that there is a clear-cut choice here, right or wrong. That nothing can bring Elias back, that in time the wound on his cheek will clot and scar and become indistinct, that he will lose nothing in letting Barnes go. Or maybe he doesn’t think. Maybe it’s no more than a muscular reflex that drives him to his feet, makes them grapple together with the knife, plunges it up into that one soft place left in Barnes, the skin stretched fine and smooth across the V at the base of his throat that gives with the tip of the blade and splits and takes it in, and (Rhah’s voice ringing in echo, Only thing can get Barnes is Barnes) Barnes’s mouth goes red.
Chris won’t know, later, what he thought. Maybe the choice makes a difference here. Maybe.
No one says a word as he lets Barnes fall. Even the trickle of blood emerging around the knife is silent. Silent as the grave, Chris thinks, and he laughs unsteadily. “Right in the jugular, oh, man. They sure train us right.”
“What the fuck, Taylor?” says Rhah at last, without moving. “Taylor, what the livin' fuck.”
“What do I do with him?” Chris asks, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “I mean, uh, what do—what’s the, the procedure once you’ve wasted your sergeant?”
“They gonna have your ass,” Rhah says. “You think nobody's gonna notice? You don’t kill somebody in your own fuckin’ bunker, man.”
Chris steps toward him over the body, holding out his hands, with the bloody palms facing up. “Look at ’em. I killed him. You think I care any more about military justice? Who gives a fuck if it’s base camp or the bush? That’s what we do: we kill people. He put his knife in me and I killed him, and you know what the chopper crews say? They say you carry your corpses with you. That’s what I did for Elias: I took Barnes on. Because that’s the only way to get Barnes. So what the fuck did you do? What did you give?”
“Shut up, Taylor,” says King uneasily. “Okay, you wasted ’im. Let's shut up and put the motherfucker away. Nobody said nothin’ ’bout no choppers.”
The fear in his voice unnerves Chris. He can feel his hands begin to shake.
“That was dumb, Taylor,” says Rhah, still motionless. “Stupid son of a bitch. That was dumb.”
“No,” Chris replies, crouching at Barnes’s side and touching the handle of the knife lightly. “That was right, for once.” He swallows the bile in his throat and begins to rifle through Barnes’s pockets. “Whatever that means.”
* * *
[2. Ain’t no straight lines in the ’Nam.]
That’s not how it begins, of course, but beginnings aren’t everything. They converge, a watershed of minor tributaries linking, a thousand rivulets into the same ocean. Chris drops out of Yale after just one year, joins up, doggedly works his way through training at Fort Lewis, boards the troop ship—myriad comings and goings perfectly orchestrated, until one day he steps out of a plane into the dust and clamor of a camp in Vietnam.
It doesn’t seem to matter: he has simply skated along, following a groove already made for him. His best friend at Yale, hearing that he was joining up, laughingly asked, “You wanna be a soldier-poet or something?” Chris thinks it’s as good an idea as any.
Barnes, his platoon sergeant, puts him on point his first mission Beyond. He’s been in-country long enough to pick up that piece of the lingo. The bush is Beyond, the infinite void past a finite universe. Knowing the lingo doesn’t help him when he’s there, though, battling the tangled growth with a machete, trying to cut a path for himself. When he finally drops with heat exhaustion, Doc and one of the sergeants minister to him. He feels Doc’s hands, cold with canteen water, on his neck, and the sergeant unloading the excess from his pack.
“You okay, troop?” asks the sergeant when they set him back on his feet. He nods, but once they release him and move on, he goes down again.
This time only the sergeant comes back, and sneaks him a little more water.
“Slow it down,” he says warmly, watching Chris drink. Chris can't remember his name.
“How the fuck”—Chris still gets a secret thrill from cursing unrestrainedly here—“am I supposed to cut a straight line through this shit?”
The sergeant laughs out loud. Chris looks up at him from the canteen.
“There’s where you’re goin’ wrong. A straight line, bullshit. Lemme let you in on somethin’, troop—Taylor, right? Taylor, ain’t no straight lines in the ’Nam. Don’t try to get somewhere, doesn’t do you no good. If there even is somewhere to go, you’ll end up there one way or another.”
“All roads lead to Ho Chi Minh, huh?” Chris asks, trying a smile.
“Wherever,” answers the sergeant, and smiles back. It’s an unexpected mixture of sweetness and strangeness that cools Chris faster than the water. Elias, he remembers suddenly. His name is Elias.
When they finally trail back into base camp for the first time, weeks later, Chris has lost every extraneous item in his pack and gained his first wound. He’s gained something bigger than the wound, too, something that he first recognizes when King ushers him into the underground bunker. Acceptance. “This man here is Chris; he been resurrected,” King announces, and they let him in.
It’s his first time high. First time smoking in years, too, since that clandestine circle that used to form at the back of the grade-school playground around a kid who filched his dad’s cigarettes. Chris gets the same feeling from this: elation and apprehension in equal measure, almost like arousal. He sits on the floor floating, his arms around his knees, watching the others. Rhah stands in a corner, space-eyed. Manny and Francis sing in falsetto. Elias and the California boy, Crawford, are dancing.
Chris likes watching Elias best, Elias and his easy grace flickering elusively in the crowd. He and Crawford have their arms around each other, Elias leading but neither one playing the girl. They dip between Lerner and Big Harold and emerge for a moment. Crawford shines with sweat where the skin of his chest and arms is left bare by his vest. Elias is stripped from the waist up, sinewy, the ridge of his spine and the flats of his shoulder-blades brown in the light as he turns, a chain glinting on the back of his neck. Chris drifts and watches, experiencing that same secret pleasure he gets from cupping a cigarette’s glow in his hands.
Time unrolls like a tunnel, with him sitting at the mouth watching his shadow stretching down it. He gets lost in the intricacies of that chain on Elias’s neck, how each link looks like a knobby vertebra in miniature. At some point Francis approaches and invites him onto the floor. He shakes his head. Francis persists, and Chris grins abstractedly and loses sight of Elias, and shakes his head again.
“Can’ even feel my feet,” he mumbles. Francis probably can’t hear, but he retreats with a shrug.
It’s years later, time beyond measure, when Chris comes up for air again. Someone takes him by the hand with a firm grip that molds itself to the small bones of his wrist. He follows it to his feet, and in his ear someone sings, “Since you left me if you see me with another girl, seemin’ like I’m ha-a-vin’ fun….”
He shivers and draws his arm back, but feels the slight pressure of fingers stay with it. “Elias?” he asks.
“Although she may be cute, she’s just a substitute….” Elias continues, a lighter voice than Chris would have expected, weightless with air beneath it. “You’re in the Underworld now, Taylor. All-access pass, one free night.”
“Too high to dance,” protests Chris.
“Shit, an’ I thought you just weren’t high enough,” says Elias, and tugs him into the circle. He maneuvers Chris’s hands into the right places: one palm up against Elias’s own, the other spread on the angle of his hip. Chris stands there flat-footed, wondering, until Elias turns and makes him follow. “Christ,” he says, releasing Chris’s hand to thump him lightly on the chest, so that his dog tags jingle, “still in your ODs and everything. I gotta order you to dance, troop?”
Chris tentatively takes his hand back. “No.” He falls quiet, listening to Elias hum along to Smokey Robinson in that buoyed-up voice of his. After a while, Chris ventures, “Feeling good’s good enough, right?” and Elias lights up and burns like a flare and for a long, long time out there on the floor, it’s true.
When Chris comes down he does it hard, as if the floor opens up under him and he falls through to his knees. He must be dying. Isn’t there a rumor the gooks fucked with the weed? Why else would his head pound and his mouth go dry? But after his showing out on that first firefight, when he panicked over a little cut on the neck, he doesn’t want to make noise. He covers well until Elias changes direction and Chris staggers against him.
“No more feelin’ good, huh?” asks Elias, and for a minute his words don’t have that light quality to them, as if he’s coming down, too. He sounds briefly the way he did in the bush when Gardner died: level and taut, voice compact as a fist. “Okay, we’re outta dancing music anyhow.”
He leads Chris to the hammock in the corner and helps him into it. Chris leans back without protest, closing his eyes. When he opens them again, later in the night when a gray gleam of twilight noses down into the bunker, Elias is still there, sitting on the floor with one arm slung up over the edge of the hammock.
“Better?” Elias asks without looking up, as though he feels the minute shift of weight above him.
“Yeah,” Chris says awkwardly.
Elias half-turns and puts a hand against the side of his neck. Chris, startled, holds very still until he realizes that Elias is adjusting his bandage, which has slipped out of position. The touch floods him, water-cool, like the first, out there in the humidity of the bush. He marvels at Elias’s gentleness, and the way sometimes it can be laced with something unexpectedly hard. Marvels that Elias can calm him this way, and yet chill him just as thoroughly with an intent look when he sets the muzzle of his gun in Chris’s mouth, or with that eerie fixed knowing smile that he flashed from his hammock earlier in the night.
“What time is it?” Chris asks at length. “Shouldn’t we be in barracks?” He props himself up carefully on one elbow and scans the bunker. The others are all scattered about in various attitudes of unconsciousness. Rhah has his head pillowed possessively on the dope pipe. Scott McKenzie is crooning somewhere about San Francisco.
Elias’s arm drapes over the hammock again. “The lifers’re all drunk tonight. Doesn’t matter.” McKenzie, far away, observes, “If you're goin' to San Francisco, you're gonna meet some gentle people there.” Stretching like a cat, arched-back, Elias says somnolently, “I lived in California once, before the war. Long time, long forever ago.” It makes perfect sense to Chris. Long forever ago. Already, in just over a month, he has lived multiple eternities here. Moments in stasis, bodies that never quite leave him, mistakes he can't get out of.
“How many days till wakeup you got?” he asks.
Elias, idly playing with the weave of the hammock, laughs. “I ain’t gonna wake up. Take a lot more’n flowers in my hair to go back to San Francisco. No gettin’ back to the world.”
A pale mound of scar tissue on his arm catches Chris’s wandering attention. Diffidently, he reaches out and touches it. “Where’d you get that?”
“Ia Drang, ’66.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Fuckin’ massacre. Whole platoon cut down. Our medic had blood up to his waist, couldn’t take it, fell all to pieces. Chunk of shrapnel flew right into my arm; by the time I noticed, I didn’t really give a damn. Just left it in, got reassigned to a new outfit wham-bam, never saw a hospital.”
Chris keeps his finger on it, almost expecting to feel it drumming a malignant pulse of its own. But all he can detect is its contoured edge bumping up under the skin, a carving in relief. Elias seems not to mind. After a few minutes, his breathing tells Chris that he’s dozed off, head against the wall, smiling.
Chris lies in the hammock watching the light move across the ceiling, tracing the small solid remnant of the war under Elias’s skin. This is Elias, Sergeant Elias three years in, Elias who knelt and baptized him in the bush: all that is hard in him is the ‘Nam.
* * *
[3. Rapture, demons of the deep.]
Jungle is spooky, Chris thinks, the skin on his back crawling. They’ve been calling Manny for a long time, but the only answer he hears is the jungle, calling back. It’s like those stories of divers who discard their gear and drown themselves; they call it rapture, the rapture of the deep. When Chris wanders too far from the others and hears his echo come back to him through the trees, he thinks it would be easy to throw aside his helmet and plunge in, deep, deep, forever.
“Manny!” yells Wolfe from the left somewhere, his voice cracking. He’s spooked, too. Chris can just make out his outline through the undergrowth, moving closer. He emerges and looks at Chris without focus, looks through him. Really spooked, Chris thinks almost with amusement. “Taylor. Where’s Barnes?”
“Dunno, sir,” Chris says. “Elias is back thataway, though.”
Wolfe stands staring, his chest heaving. The armpits of his shirt are dark with sweat. His throat moves quickly up and down in a swallow, and then he says, “Okay, okay, Elias.” He blunders back through the bush, and in a moment Chris hears him speaking to Elias, and Elias’s low reply. The sound comforts Chris obscurely, breaks into the rapture. He turns and follows Wolfe.
“I’ll stay behind,” Elias is saying. “Keep looking for Manny.”
“Six said to get our asses downriver to that gook village,” snaps Wolfe.
“So get their asses downriver, Lieutenant,” says Elias with the trace of a smile. “You don’t need a full complement.”
“I don’t know that, Elias. They think it’s an NVA stockpile or something. And I want everybody outta here before we lose anybody else.”
“We can’t leave him behind.” Chris, watching from the edge of the clearing, sees that hardness come into Elias.
“Goddammit, it’s not leaving him behind. They’re sending engineers to this position in ten, fifteen minutes, tops.”
“So I’ll stick around till they get here. Meet you at the village.”
Wolfe sighs and looks away. “All right. But if they’re not here in fifteen, you get your ass in gear. I don’t wanna wait on you.”
Elias grins, a quick ironic flash. “No problem, Lieutenant. I go fast enough by myself I’ll prob’ly beat you there.” And he's gone into the bush again.
“Thinks he walks on water,” Wolfe says shortly, loud enough for Chris to hear. “Beat us there. Great.”
The platoon makes good time to the village, all of them as unnerved as Wolfe by the area, by the memory of Sal staggering out of a bunker like an armless automaton. They make such good time that it gets away from them. Somewhere along the way—maybe when they’re standing in the river looking at Manny hung like a signpost—the internal clock gets out of whack. They stumble to the village just trying to catch up with time, with what seems to have already happened to them. Bunny shoots a pig and its squeal sounds like their voices in the forest calling Manny. Barnes shoots a fleeing farmer. All of it déjà vu. A foregone conclusion.
Chris barges into the first hut he sees, his M-16 raised and Francis at his side. Under the floorboards he finds a tunnel and two pairs of eyes shining in the dimness. They won’t come out. He yells at them, and they won’t come out. His voice goes high and flutters and doubles back on him, and he feels dizzy, the light from the door receding. His pulse sings in his ears, and in a voice dense and distorted as if underwater, Francis keeps saying, Calm down, man, calm down, they scared, too. Chris drags the two villagers out, an old woman and a boy, one-legged, ribs like a basket, empty eyes. The voices make no sense, and his body feels numb and compressed by impossible pressure, and he dives and dives. Rapture, demons of the deep. Only his hands have any substance, holding the gun.
Outside, they’re blowing tunnels with grenades, something’s exploding. Things are exploding.
That’s when someone hits him from behind, so hard that he drops his gun and nearly goes sprawling into the villagers. He turns.
“Get out of here, all of you,” Elias says flatly. He’s breathing hard, as if he's been running; he must have known what was coming. Francis is dumb beside him. Bunny lingers in the doorway, watching with a dead expression. “Get out.”
Francis slinks around him and out the door. Chris squats in the dirt, fumbling with his rifle, his eyes burning with the aftereffects of adrenaline. He hears Bunny disappointedly say “Fuck” and walk away. He can’t seem to get a grip on the gun, and for a moment all he wants is for Elias to take him by the arm and lead him away, as if it were all just a bad trip, and now a bad comedown.
“Let’s go, Taylor,” says Elias. “I ain’t got time to babysit. I don’t get out there, Barnes is gonna drive those boys so crazy they waste this whole place.” When Chris looks up, he’s already gone.
Outside, a thin old man leads a woman out of the village square. As he passes, Chris looks at them sideways: the woman flushed and excited, her hair flyaway, the man’s back a white tracery of old scars. A little girl trails after them.
In the square, the platoon, paused shamefaced on the brink of frenzy, is arranged around Barnes. Elias stands apart, speaking with Wolfe, cold as ice. He never looks at the rest. Barnes just watches, taut with unspent energy, his unfired gun in one hand; watches, with death in his eyes.
“We’re supposed to torch it,” says Wolfe, not meeting Elias’s gaze. “There’s no, uh, evidence they’re NVA, but they’ve gotta be giving ‘em supplies. So we evac the village and torch it.”
“Fine,” says Elias. “You tell your men not to fuck around.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Elias,” says Wolfe.
“No, ’course you don’t.”
“Don’t you fuck around, ’lias,” Barnes calls across the square. “Don’t you fuck around with my war.” Elias gives no sign of having heard.
They clear the village swiftly. Fires erupt up along the huts, whittling them into grotesque flaming skeletons. Chris dully watches the men go by. Doc carrying a little boy with no arms. Lerner murmuring to his charge in Vietnamese. Bunny lighting up a house and a cigarette in almost the same motion. Rodriguez walking through the rubble, his helmet shining like an apparition, the word “Grace” scrawled on it in block letters. Maybe that’s his girl’s name, maybe something else. Rodriguez is the sky pilot of the platoon, has a religious shrine back at base camp and humps his Bible through the countryside the way Chris humps Siegfried Sassoon’s Collected Poems. Grace is ev’rywhere, he said once, you hear me, Taylor, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, grace is ev’rywhere….
Rodriguez blows another tunnel, someone screaming inside. Sure is, thinks Chris, leaving the shadow of the village where behind him the houses walk up in smoke to the sky.
On the outskirts, behind the trees, Bunny and Junior and a few others are herding two little girls from the village. They’re just doing their job, but something about it raises the hairs on the back of Chris’s neck—maybe the way the men watch the girls, dark-eyed and simmering. Later, he doesn’t know why he goes over and takes the girls himself. Maybe it’s an attempt at redemption, but these days he believes in redemption about as much as he believes in divine grace. Maybe he can’t stand Bunny’s inhuman expression of contained fury. Maybe, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Elias watching from across the field. He’s not sure that the way he gets there matters, because however he spins it he still probably saved the girls. And however he spins it, when they stop outside the village to plan their next move and his hands are full with the littler girl, Elias still helps him take off his pack.
Wolfe spreads out the maps and squints over them. “We’re supposed to check out another village, five klicks west,” he says, running a finger along the parchment. “I don’t even see a village there.”
“Hell with it,” says Barnes. “Maps don’ mean nothin’. Moving’s what we do.”
O’Neill squats down and makes a show of examining the maps as well. Like much of the platoon’s intelligence, they’re hopelessly outdated: some areas still identified only by French colonial names, some not identified at all. “Gotta agree with ya there, Bob,” says O’Neill. “Lotta unexplored country out there.”
Wolfe flushes and rolls up the maps. “All right, we’ll head west.”
Chris falls in beside Elias as they move out. “Sounds like Shakespeare," he says.
“Whaddaya talkin’ about, Taylor?” asks Elias distractedly, glancing down the line.
“Quote from one of Shakespeare’s plays. ‘The undiscovered country.’ Death.”
Elias’s lips quirk a little, and he says wryly, “Yeah, you think Red O’Neill’s read a lotta Shakespeare?” He puts his gun over his shoulders and rests his hands loosely on it, one on the muzzle and one on the butt. He smiles, looking straight ahead. “Don’ worry about it. We ain’t goin’ there today. Not today.”
* * *
[4. The worm has definitely turned.]
In the nights after the burning of the village, Chris takes to sleeping in Rhah’s hole. Rhah has a comfortingly dialectic view of right and wrong here: “Love” and “Hate” tattooed on his knuckles, love and hate battling for people’s souls. In his hole, at least, Chris thinks he has some buffer against the bush.
One night as the stars are starting to show up against the sky, Rhah turns to him with a leer.
“How long you been here, Taylor? Half your time?”
“Something like that.” He knows it almost to the hour, but there’s some element of indiscretion in mentioning the countdown so early.
“You know what it means to be a believer?” Rhah’s been smoking a joint all night, and his eyes have a red cast to them. “Huh, Taylor? I hear you been to Yale. They teach you what that means?”
Chris shakes his head.
Rhah puts the joint between his lips again and leans back. “Bad vibes buildin’ up here. Hate, hate, hate. Burned that village—we gonna burn. You feel it? Charlie on his way.”
Chris shifts and lies quiet. When the moon is high, maybe he’ll take out his Collected Poems and read. Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin / They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives. Until then, though, he’s stuck in the dark, listening to Rhah dreaming out loud.
Rhah looms up over him, charged with sudden energy. The smell of the weed is so strong that Chris feels lightheaded.
“Believer’s a dead man, Taylor. Stone cold.” Chris recoils slightly, watching him. After a silence, Rhah sits down again and starts to hum around the joint, grinning a death’s-head grin. In a moment, Chris identifies the familiar tune.
Now I’m a believer,
without a trace
of doubt in my mind....
The fine hairs on Chris's arms and neck prickle like a premonition, and, unnerved, he scrambles out of the hole. He pauses there on the ground for a moment, sensing his vulnerability and the vast openness of the sky. But still Rhah hums behind him, and trembling he feels his way through the underbrush.
Farther down the line he comes upon Elias sitting on guard duty on the edge of his hole, his M-16 cradled in his lap. They haven’t exchanged a word since the village. Chris goes to him, feeling almost humbled, and squats beside him.
“Mind some company?”
Elias shakes his head, his eyes somewhere else. With a sigh, Chris stretches his legs out in from of him and settles into his poncho.
“Nice night,” he says.
Elias grunts and replies, “Eye of the storm.”
“You think so?”
Elias nods, far away. “It’ll piss buckets on us tomorrow.” He might look sideways at Chris, or that might just be a trick of the shadows. “We don’t get outta anything this easy.”
Chris tucks his legs under the poncho and asks hesitantly, “Do you believe… that stuff about knowing you’re gonna die?”
This time Elias does look at him, darkly amused. “You thought you were gonna die that first time out, didn’t you? When you got hit in the neck?”
“Yeah,” Chris says sheepishly.
“Yeah. Guys that talk about it, those are the guys that live. I really don’t think death gives a shit. I think it takes whatever it can get. You never know where it’s gonna come from anyway, so why spin your wheels?”
Chris considers this, and can’t decide if it’s a comfort or not. To discard direction. To relinquish choice.
Elias chuckles and says, “You remember that first time out? You on point tryin’ to whack through that bush with enough for the whole damn platoon in your pack. How do I cut a straight line.”
Warm and suddenly drowsy, Chris laughs and says, “I still hate going on point. Leading the way into who knows what. No thanks.”
“Yeah,” says Elias heavily. Chris peers at him through the dark. The moon is rising, blue and bloated as a corpse. Their skin looks strange in its light: Chris’s hand lying outside the poncho, Elias’s upturned face. “I love this place at night,” Elias says. “The stars. There’s no right or wrong in ’em.”
“Feelin’ good’s good enough, huh?” Chris asks.
Elias looks him full in the eyes then, all pupils, and says in a hard voice, “Don’t I fuckin’ wish.” He looks away just as quickly, but Chris is left with the vision of those two black holes like an afterimage. They sit without sound for a while, and then Elias says carefully, “Sorry. I had a joint before; sometimes it makes me crazy. It’ll pass.” He tilts his head back and puts his hands out flat behind him, and he says again, “It’ll pass.”
With a pang, Chris reaches back and puts his hand over Elias’s. He means it to be a brief contact, but in the moonlight their hands there together look so unreal that they seem to be apart from him. He lets them stay.
Gradually Elias seems to notice, and his teeth shine in that smile. The strange and sweet one, hard and tender, thrilled and resigned. He doesn’t smile that way often. He broke into it before Chris’s first patrol, when he warned the new men not to yell out if they got lost; when he set his gun in Chris’s mouth and held the trigger; when he said, “See ya next week” and ducked into the endless VC tunnel complex. A reckless smile, predator and prey both, tied up with danger. Chris thinks that this contact, too, carries its own kind of danger; but they do not move their hands.
“The worm has definitely turned,” Chris says quietly.
Above them, a star falls. And so does he.
* * *
[5. “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.”]
“Elias is dead,” says Barnes.
Chris stands stock still, staring. Barnes says Elias is dead out there. It’s swarming with VC, Barnes says, and they have to get out. He sweeps past and doesn't look back.
Chris turns to follow, then stops. They don’t leave men behind, not even dead ones. An empty gesture, maybe, saving what’s already gone, but even the VC do it—they tie vines around their legs before they go into the jungle so that their corpses can be pulled out more efficiently. Maybe it doesn’t matter if anyone is saved; maybe no one is savable. Maybe making the choice is all there is. Chris swallows and plunges into the trees.
He doesn’t have to go far. The sound reaches him first: the rasping frictional sound of something dragged on the forest floor. It could be the VC, but somehow he knows it’s not. He follows it blindly, branches dragging at him, close blasts of artillery like echoes coming back to him from the deep.
(You wanna be a soldier-poet or something?)
(Soldiers are dreamers....)
(I ain’t gonna wake up.)
Elias is half-collapsed at the base of a tree, trying to haul himself upright on his rifle. He holds one hand over his chest, around which the blood blossoms black-red.
“Oh, fuck,” breathes Chris, and goes to him. “Don’t get up.” He tugs clumsily at Elias, who falls against him and then—Chris can’t support the sudden weight—back to the ground on his stomach. “Fuck, I’m sorry, stay there, stay there. I’ll get you out.”
“Taylor.” Elias almost snarls the word. It might be the pain, or it might be something else. Chris can see his eyes flash up, and he senses Elias’s resentment. He should be alone for this, on his feet. He should be able to choose it; but it’s too late for that now. “No.” Elias’s voice cuts out again like a scratched record, and his eyes go away briefly, where Chris can’t follow. Then he laughs. “Don’t move me now. Won’t make it.”
Chris crouches beside him, preternaturally calm. The blood is everywhere, the leaves of the low plants brilliant with it. He puts his hand on Elias’s where it lies sprawled beside his awkward prone body. It’s warm with blood, but underneath Chris can feel it going clammy. He wishes he had some water to give.
Elias gasps a little and curls around his wound, so that his back arches up off the ground. His shoulder-blades move sharply under his vest. “What did—good old Shakespeare—have to say about it?”
At first Chris doesn’t understand. Then it clicks into place, cold and relentless as a bullet dropping into a chamber. Automatically, he supplies, “Hamlet, Act Three, Scene One: ‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.’”
Elias curls tighter, and in a wrenched voice says, “I’ll take point—Taylor—since you hate it so much.” His free hand gives a thumbs-up from the ground, as if he’s just nerving himself to duck into another dark, labyrinthine tunnel complex.
In the trees behind them they can hear the VC coming, an almost peaceful sound, smooth and certain as the sea.
“Get out,” says Elias, and pulls his hand away.
Chris takes it back. He closes his eyes in the near-quiet of the jungle, and thinks of Barnes and villages burning and wakeup months hence in some grimy unfamiliar airport in the States. He asks, “Can I go with you?”
The worm turns; the world turns, without a wobble in its axis. Elias’s hand is cold and wet and going still. When Chris opens his eyes, Elias has blood in his mouth, but he smiles. Smiles, and smiles, and smiles.
“I go faster alone,” he says. And he does.