Soldiers Song

Innocence is sacrificed on a journey of no return.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soldiers Song

There had been a lot of us just sitting around in the sweltering heat at the NCO club when the shots began. O’Reilly, who might have been eighteen or thirty five, took a final swallow of the beer he’d been sitting alone with. He set the bottle down slowly, clenched his jaw and rose casually to his feet. As he rose up I saw once again the bored, vacant look in his eye change suddenly to a bright gleam almost sadistically enthusiastic.

            While most of the other men, who’d been busying themselves arm wrestling, boasting of women or just drowning their sorrows with the bad local beer just sat around wondering where the shots came from and how they were going to respond to it, O’Reilly simply walked out of the front of the big tent. I was right behind him, specialist Michael Williams. I knew there would soon be a sight to be seen…

            And not missed.

            He walked outside and greeted the afternoon air without concern. He watched the bullets chip away at a wooden sign we had posted outside the latrine (The sign read: The real ammo dump), calculating the bullets angle of origin and turning his head to look in that direction.  To his right, from atop a hill a sniper threaded our camp with destiny.

            O’Reilly, his sweat stained back to me, began walking quickly toward the hill. I watched after him a moment, realizing it had only been three days since I met the man, been exposed to his irrational behavior.

In that time, he had changed my life.

            O’Reilly and I met about seventeen miles east of Cambodia.

            We had received orders that we were to dig in, Charlie was coming.  The Special Forces ahead of us had sent word back that we were drastically outnumbered (something I verified easily by a random look around after the battle was ended), and that they expected we might be attacked from any or all sides. As we began to dig in, the talk was that out scouting party had turned out to be a suicide party. No one argued the matter.

            The sun was far into the west and I remember looking at it as if we were brothers, each as much a prisoner to our destiny as a man in handcuffs being led to the gas chamber.

            I spent a lot of time that day thinking about the fact that I had reupped, come back for more of this s**t. I was angry at myself for doing that and I directed my anger toward digging, knowing I had to get into Mother Earth just as I knew why I had reenlisted. There was nothing for me back in the states. I had reenlisted (and this was the state of my mind after two years in the Vietnam jungle) with the belief that I could gather enough pictures and stories to publish a book one day. I entertained the fact that staying in Nam would be an investment in my future. The idea was, of course, reinforced by a few realities.

            I grew up an orphan and had no family. Going back to the states would quite likely mean burning through my savings faster than I could find a job. I was a writer, but not a good one. The action here was dramatic enough to compensate for my lack of skills, provided I stayed long enough to gather a surplus that could survive editing. I had no other skills to speak of and certain crimes I had committed, though they did not prevent me from entering the military, would certainly keep me out of the Police Academy. (It had, in fact, been a judge’s idea that I join the military. He insisted that the discipline and the regimentation would “Redirect my energies.” Such was the state of my civilian life.) And while I admit there wasn’t a big demand for Vietnam War stories at the time, the challenge seemed equal to me, civilian or military. Both were a battle of sorts.

            These things went through my mind as I dug the bunker myself. O’Reilly, who was to share the bunker with me, hadn’t been around for a couple of hours. I began to wonder if he was coming back at all, knowing that if he didn’t, I stood a snowballs chance in hell of making it through the night alive.

            The hole was nearly completed when he showed up.

            He took the shovel from me without a word and finished the hole. He stacked the sandbags with careful precision while I cleaned my M16.

            Before long, he was off again.

            The dark was settling in quickly and I was eating a little of my rations when I spotted O’Reilly again. He had a number of gas cans that he spilled out onto the ground a few yards

away from the  hole and all around it, encircling it.  He had sacks of gun powder and grenades and Claymores and tripwires and he ran about the foxhole setting them up. When the enemy came upon us, there was a strong appreciation for his efforts.

            They came at us from the north and from the east, on foot and en masse. O’Reilly sat in the hole, one hand behind his head, leaning against the dirt wall.

            I told him he ought to pay a little more attention to what was going on around him that his all too casual attitude about this very dangerous situation might just get us both killed! I took a shot at something a few dozen yards away as he sat up, looked at me.

            “Understand this,” he said flatly, “There is no safer place than this.” And that was all. I looked at him, convinced it was my fortune to share this hole in the ground, a hole that was not unlike a grave, with a lunatic. I looked at him briefly before returning my fire, wondering whether he was a much a concern to me as the enemy that surrounded us. I didn’t have time to think. I only knew at the moment that thinking about it would certainly drive me to a state of mind I did not want to be in, one too unstable even for the violent and crazy environment we shared together then. I looked out of the hole, fired occasionally.

            Soon, amidst explosions and weapons fire, I could see silhouettes of the enemy coming within range.

            Once again I spared a glance over at O’Reilly. Nothing about his position had changed. Frantic, I quietly but hurriedly informed him that they were no longer just coming, they were here, and maybe, just f*****g maybe he should get up and start thinking about that. Slowly, reluctantly, he got up, aimed his weapon.

            Even in the dim light of the battle fire that surrounded us, I could see that he was not aiming his rifle at any one of them. I remember the greatest, most overwhelming feeling that I had at that moment that seemed so close to death, was that I felt decidedly, and quite completely alive. There were no sluggish feelings, no idle emotions, feelings that had, in the past driven me to steal a car or start a fight. The shadows that drew closer might have been the very hands of The Reaper but I felt completely capable of annihilating them. I aimed my M16 at one, eager to get into it, needing to.

            O’Reilly stopped me.

            The enemy drew to within twenty yards from us. There were at least a dozen of them, all looking our way, at us.

            I looked over at O’Reilly. He was looking through the sights of his rifle, his face a picture of concentration. He smiled suddenly, a winning Irish smile, and switched his rifle from auto to semi. My eyes grew wide. The enemy was within ten feet of our foxhole and O’Reilly had done nothing so far.

            “Duck,” he said and let a shot fly.

            It all began.

            His single, initial shot hit something he had positioned nearby. It exploded, igniting a fire that raced across the ground. This line of flames lit a ring of gasoline that surrounded our hole, catching a fuse along the way that led to another explosion.

            Most of the soldiers that had been near us a moment earlier were now scattered upon the ground. The few that remained were apprehensive, preoccupied with what was going on around them. They looked about nervously.

            The area was surrounded by a short but solid ring of fire. The flames made the scene surreal, timeless. I was captivated. No other thoughts entered my mind. I was no longer a man that had once been an orphan, a thief. I was merely an observer in a place called hell and nothing else mattered. Things simply were. Anything that wasn’t there, on that little piece of war-torn ground just outside of Cambodia, simply wasn’t.

            “Nice to meet you, Charlie,” O’Reilly said as he began clamoring out of the hole. “But you have to go now.” He got out, looked at the remaining soldiers and fired, his weapon now on automatic.

            In a split second they were all down, dead.

            All but one.

This one had been standing in the rear, to the right of the others. He’d been injured and had fallen from the first explosion. I watched as he reached for his own rifle that he must have dropped when he’d fallen. He got it, his eyes on O’Reilly all the while. After a moment he approached, slowly, walking with a limp.

            He came within ten feet of O’Reilly, who only stood motionless, looking at the man. They both stood staring into each other’s eyes. It was as if there was some kind of conversation going on between them, an exchange of some ungoverned information that each understood, a dark secret shared in common. Neither of them so much as blinked.

            I watched as the enemy soldier began to grin. It was a toothless smile that came across his face, as if in response to whatever had been going on between them moments earlier. He began to yell, a sound that, except for perhaps the vibrato that can be identified with laughter, sounded very much like a madman’s cackle.

            He charged O’Reilly.

            “No!” O’Reilly said and he pulled the trigger, sprayed the soldier with bullets.

Through the expression of pain, I could see in the man’s eyes what looked like gratitude. As he fell, I noticed he was an officer.

            O’Reilly climbed back into the hole without a word and a minute later he resumed the position he had been earlier. He lit a cigarette and smoked it in silence, as if it were the only thing in the world and nothing at all had just happened. Before he finished the smoke, I asked him for one. He gave me one and I realized I didn’t have a light. I didn’t ask him for one because it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all.

            Silence hung about us the rest of that night like darkness in a cemetery. Neither of us spoke or made any attempt to get out of the hole. There was no reason to.

            Soon after dawn I sat looking at myself in a small, round mirror that I usually carried with me. I had developed a mild obsession with the changes that had taken place in me since I arrived in Nam. There were lines on my face that hadn’t been there before. There were shadowy half-moons tattooed under my eyes that I believed weren’t necessarily there only because of a consistent shortage of sleep. In a time when the free world was discovering long hair, I kept mine short. I think it had something to do with the fact that the VC were fond of tacking up long haired scalps on trees. It was a thing I had seen too often to push my luck with. They seemed to have a tendency to single long haired guys out, like something they liked to collect.

            I looked at my big nose. It was a boxer’s nose, all wide and flattened out. There were some people that I could never convince that I had never been hit there, despite the numerous fights I had been in. Before I was in Vietnam, I had never paid much attention to these things.

But now they were very interesting to me. There were times " many times " that I felt that my face looked foreign, somehow, strange. It was my eyes, however, that I was consistently hung up on. They looked as if they belonged to someone else, an old man, maybe.

Or a witch doctor…

            I stopped looking at myself at the thought, and put the mirror away.

            O’Reilly was smoking a joint. His eyes looked as if he were deeply involved in thought. The smoke from his joint floated up unchallenged in the still morning air. It was as I was noticing this that he turned to focus on me. His eyes held mine for a moment before I looked away, afraid of what I might see in the eyes of the crazy Irishman. He continued looking at me nonetheless and it made me uncomfortable to be the subject of his thoughts, particularly after events from the night before. I could not begin to guess what went on in his thoughts, what direction his mind might travel. His staring at me gave me a reason to climb out of that hole.

            Within an hour a helicopter had come to pick us up, the only survivors of the entire battle.

            The next day I sat in isolation, not wanting to talk to anyone, eating some lunch but not really tasting it. I knew only I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to be questioned, as some of the guy’s had tried to do already, about what had happened on that battlefield. Should I have explained to them that I had counted bodies until I lost track and that I couldn’t find any desire to recount them, make sure I had gotten the figures right? Should I have presented what had happened as if it were a campfire tale, or a fish story? I just wasn’t interested in what the proper etiquette was for a man that had survived a battle that had taken the lives of so many others, friend and foe. One thing that interested me was how I was going to go about having peace of mind the rest of my life, because I knew at that point that simply leaving would not give me comfort, that leaving was only possible by lobotomy. Memories were ghosts that knew where you went to hide…

            And followed you.

            So I sat, alone, caught up with these internal demons, caught up in myself about having reenlisted for more of the madness, questioning the sanity of that decision, my modus operendi.

            I sipped my canteen, tipping my head way back and letting the water splash onto my face, an attempt to rinse away my anxiety. The feeling was cut off, replaced by another.

            Someone held a gun to my head.

            “Don’t move,” a voice said from behind me. My canteen was soon emptied all over me.

            It was O’Reilly. He moved to the front of me and sat down, keeping the .45 pointed at me all the while. He stared at me for a moment, offering me no explanation of his intention, his eyes

not unlike the eyes of a shark as it closed in to feed. Feelings that had become increasingly familiar, engrossed me.

            These feelings did not come all at once, in a rush, as they used to, but gradually. O’Reilly smiled suddenly, the understanding smile of a man that has just come to know how to do something he was eager to do. I wanted to understand why he looked like that and for a moment, I did, but then it was gone, like an ingredient in a recipe you can’t quite pinpoint. I didn’t return his smile. I was preoccupied.

            He reached into his fatigue pocket and produced a thick rubber band. He placed it around his thumb and forefinger and stretched it. He then took it off, threw it to me, gestured for me to do the same.

            “And hold it,” he said.

            I did so, opening my thumb and forefinger a little and understanding nothing except maybe that he was crazy. He nodded, satisfied. For a minute I thought someone might see what was going on and come and put a stop to it.  As quickly I realized I sat between O’Reilly and anyone that might see that he held a gun on me. My heart raced as I tried to figure a way to resolve the situation.

            I remember now that, as he held that gun on me I had been relieved of the self-reflection, the doubts, the trivialities that had so overwhelmed me before that moment. I felt clean, free no matter how deeply they sliced. I was no longer victim to the doldrums or the memories that had so burdened me before.

            “Do you feel it?” he asked, his eyes growing wide at last, as if “it” was something specific that he thought I already understood.

            “Feel what?” I asked, impatient about both the pistol and the rubber band.

            “You know what I mean, man,” he said, looking into my eyes as if my thoughts were on display within them. I certainly did entertain a number of feelings, and I told him so.

            “C’mon, he said, continuing. “You know what I’m talking about. The feelings man, the music. Don’t lie to yourself.”

            I got impatient with him then, told him to put the damn gun down and stop the senseless babble or…

            “Or what?” he asked and laughed briefly. Then his face became coldly sober again. “Or shoot you, get it over with? Is that what you were going to say?”

            I swallowed hard wondering if that had been what I was about to say and uncertain if I would have actually meant it, had it been so. I felt again the feelings I had felt in the foxhole I had shared with him, feeling that alcohol, or any drug, even in the strongest dose, could not permanently suppress. These feelings were sadistic but satisfying and they justified themselves without contempt.

            “You and I,” he said. “We share the same bed partner.”

            I didn’t reply to that, only looked down at the elastic.

            O’Reilly saw this, told me not to release it yet, that he would let me know, or that I would figure it out for myself.

            “What bed partner is that?” I asked, getting back to what he had said but not sure why. I guess I was trying to humor him, or distract him. At any rate, I watched him, the man who had been responsible for saving my life. I wondered if he considered me in his debt and if his idea of collecting was to subject me to whatever he felt like doing to me. I felt contempt for this, if that was what he was doing, for saving a man’s life was not like loaning him money.

            “Death,” he said an answer to my question. He said it as if he did not believe I needed it to be answered by someone, as if I had known the answer all along.

            Without a doubt the situation held my attention. But it also aroused a strong curiosity in me, a need to understand what he was trying to tell me. It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, this man was not so intense after all. It was a thought I tried to crush, but couldn’t.

            “Remember when you were a child,” he began, “how you would play on the swings at the park. Then one day you just jump off.  It had always been fun but now it wasn’t. You jump off, walk away, and don’t go back. It just doesn’t interest you anymore.” He looked at me solemnly.

“Tighten that elastic,” he said, and I did, stretching my finger apart from my thumb. My hand was beginning to burn a little and the muscles felt like they would soon begin to quiver.

            “Now remember when you were a teenager on a date. You have been to second base a dozen times and it just doesn’t cut it, y’know. You really want to go all the way!” he said, his eyes growing wide once again at the end of what he said. “Eventually you do.” He raised one eyebrow, smiled a Cheshire cat kind of grin.

            “But then you want to do it again and again and again. You never get enough.”

            I searched every feature of his face. He was tight, totally caught up in what he was saying, the fact that he was saying it. It was as if he had to say it, a little something he understood that he had to share. The whole thing left me feeling as much a patient as a doctor, as much a friend as enemy.

            “Tighten that elastic some more, as far as you can go with it,” he said, this time with impatience in his voice. I did as he asked and this time my hand did begin to quiver a little. He saw this and smiled. It was a satisfied sort of smile but it also had a look of sympathy in it. “Good,” he said. “It won’t be long now.”

            He reached in his fatigue shirt and pulled out a joint, lit it, held the smoke in.

            “Then you kill a man,” he said, exhaling the smoke, “an act that can never be forgotten. It is something that can never, ever be undone. And, more importantly, it can never, no matter what you do, be equaled.” He looked me square in the eye then and I could see a kind of sadness. I thought he had deliberately expressed it, as if desiring sympathy.

            “Some people believe that life is like a staircase. You spend your entire existence climbing up, experiencing this and that, casting some of it aside and using some of it to gain yet another stair. And one day, you find yourself at the top. You’ve already felt that certain special something that is the ultimate in exhilaration for you.” His eyes were wild looking, the conversation carrying him away. “So there you are, at the top,” he said, continuing, but without the enthusiasm he’d had a moment before. “And you’ve got nowhere else to go.”

            My hand was burning at this point.

            “So you stand up there, look over the edge, see what is there, y’know. You look down and there is nothing there that you want to deal with, man, nothing a man of flesh and blood can handle. There are things on the other side that you can’t even imagine! All you can do is try to find new and more exciting ways to duplicate what got you there to begin with, because there is no way you can go down. The stairway you came up is gone.” He paused. I guess it was to let these things he’d said sink in.

            “That’s where we are, my man. That’s where we are. We’ve seen so much in so little time that nothing really does it for us anymore. That elastic you have there, the tension you feel, it’s symbolic of the feelings we have inside of us. There’s a tension within us all the time that we

 

have to find some way to relieve, or go insane. There is no way to escape, only things to distract us for a while.” He paused again, as if to consider what he had said. I hated him then. Him and his absurd belief about all the bullshit he was throwing my way, despite the fact that I knew it was true.

            “You know,” he continued, “a lot of psychiatrists believe that a good majority of old people pass away simply because they’ve no longer any reason to live. They have nothing to do anymore except sit and grow older, more and more feeble. They have nothing to occupy their time and they simply lose their will to live. Boredom actually kills them. Can you believe it? Boredom. It’s a goddamn deadly thing man, and it will eat you up from the inside out. You begin to feel so,” he paused, searched for the right word, “so unalive that you have to do something, or just curl up and die.” There was a definite sadness in his eyes at this point but I felt no pity for him.

            “Did you know that George Washington, the beloved Father of our country, used to enjoy-actually enjoy!- hearing bullets whistle past his ear. Man,” he said and he shook his head, as if he found that truly amazing, or unbelievable.

            “And Napoleon,” he said, continuing with a renewed vigor. “Now there’s a guy. I’d bet my life that guy used to ride into a battle with a hard on. I bet it was like a good f**k, that

fighting and winning and winning and fighting. But you know, at Waterloo, I think he must have known, man. He must have known that he was going to lose, that something was wrong. It happens to us all, sooner or later. We lose. And he knew it! I’m sure of it, can feel it. But then, what choice did he have? Could he just stop the momentum he’d begun? Could he just change his mind about the things he was doing, who he was? No way. He wasn’t about to go out with the anticlimactic feeling of being a loser. He had to go on, even if it meant he would die because if he didn’t proceed then it was like he was dead anyway. And you know, we have that same way about us, pal.” He took a brief drag off his joint and blew the smoke in my face, looking deep into my eyes all the while. My hand was shaking quite badly at that point and he knew it. I was distracted by it, and I was fast becoming impatient.

            “Good old Napoleon marched his unruly a*s right into that battle, knowing it would be the end of him. He committed suicide, same as Hitler, because he couldn’t bend, couldn’t stoop. He had to have the exhilaration he had at the top. He had to have the freedom to kill, enjoy the feeling that is like no other. He knew there is nothing in this world that will fire you up inside the way a good battle will. I have it, man, this feeling, and so do you. It’s young in you but it’s growing fast. I could see it in your eyes when we shared that foxhole. It’s written all over your face, in your actions. That’s the reason you came here to be alone, because you were trying to

convince yourself that you didn’t enjoy it, that there were other reasons you reenlisted. Stop me if I’m wrong. It’s young in you but it’s growing fast, boy. Real fast.” I hated him the way I have never hated anything in my life. The rubber band was driving me crazy and I’d had enough of the gun in my face and I wanted to kill him then, just watch his guts drip onto the ground.

            “So now it comes down to you, that rubber band and this .45 I’m holding on you. I wonder how much longer you will just sit there and put up with this. How long can you take the sensation of that rubber band, what it’s doing to you?  How long can you go in between times when you’re out on the battlefield with your a*s on the line, when either you win or you lose, you live or you die? I wonder. The feeling won’t go away on its own you have to make it go away. You have to create that distraction, that exhilaration.”

            He paused and I searched his face. I wondered, then, if he really would shoot me. He tossed me a joint, and a match.

            “Whenever you’re ready,” he began and I realized I must have had my thoughts all over my face and that he must have understood that for whatever reason, whether I was completely fed up with this game, or, as he had been suggesting that I was in need of a release, I was considering calling his bluff.

            “Whenever you’re ready. Make you’re move. You need to get rid of that feeling, man.

You need to find something beyond what you feel in your hand right now.”

            I swallowed. O’Reilly must have thought it was a preparatory gesture, a prelude to my making a move on him.

            He stuck the gun right in my face and slid the slide back, loading a round into the chamber.

            “You’ve forgotten all about that elastic on your hand now, haven’t you,” he said after a few seconds. He was right. There was nothing on my mind then except what was going on at that moment. There were no distractions. The elastic, the burning, the quivering of the muscles in my hand were forgotten.

            “Now you’re in bed with death, my friend. Isn’t she such a sweet f**k? Don’t you just want to give her all your attention? You forget all about death even as you roll around in the bed with her.” Sweat that had been beading upon my forehead rolled into my eyes, burning them. I could not close them or make a move to wipe it off.

            “My grandfather,” he began, “used to call this feeling ‘The Soldier’s Song’ He was a poetic son of a b***h but I think it’s a pretty good title. He said it was a feeling that had been felt by every war hero since man left Eden. He was a soldier himself but he only got a mild taste of it. He said guy’s like Audy Murphy, guy’s that were real war heroes, only got to be war heroes

because they were driven by this crazy feeling. When the war was over, there was nothing for them to do anymore except be bored and get drunk to forget all about it. He said these feelings were the bluest of the blues, man, an incurable disease that would set a man on a collision course with himself as he attempted to forget about it by doing crazy things.” He stopped again for a brief second before continuing.

            “Tell you what I’m going to do now. I’m going to save you the trouble of trying to spend the rest of your life trying to find new and exciting ways of becoming a hero. I’m going to set you free, my man. Say goodbye.” And he pulled the trigger.

            I had already pissed myself before I realized there were no bullets in the pistol. I remained still a few moments before I got up. He was looking at me all the while with a strange, satisfied sort of look.

            I hit him right in the mouth and walked away. He was laughing behind me and I just didn’t care. I walked away from him feeling lor ike a child that had just been raped. It was a bad feeling yet somehow it felt as if it had been right, as if what O’Reilly had said had been right. I knew that things would never be the same for me. I lit the joint. He was right. I had realized in that foxhole that, even more than alcohol it helped pacify the apprehension that comes between things that are exhilarating and the boring moments I might dwell on problems, such as

mortality. I realized then that life really did breed a desire to defy death, that truly living meant dwelling on the brink of annihilation.

            Now I could see him running up that hill, chasing after the sniper. I could understand why he was doing it, that he really didn’t have a choice.

            I set my M16 on the ground and began loading my camera. I left my rifle lying there on the dirt as I started up that hill. I knew I would no longer be needing it.

 

            Thank you for taking the time to read this.

            Lakutawakon (Peace)

            For more free reading including extensive excerpts by Brian S Goodson, visit

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