Who Do You Love?

A scene of Vietnam...

The world lights up around me as I lie huddled in the protective arms of a gnarled bunch of roots. I am not what I seem. I am merely a child in this world of horror and death. I am afraid; they can smell me and my fear. I am assured it is my fate to die here and be left to rot in these godforsaken jungles in Viet Nam. After all, the greatest man I have ever known was just killed right in front of me, and if he had no chance in this hell hole, how should I expect mercy from the icy hand of death?

 

Horns and voices sound in the distance as I rest for a while under the shade of some unknown jungle tree. Next to me sits Corporal Jerome Harper. He is invisible in the dim of this surreal jungle light, only the glint of his eyes visible. If one stares long enough, they can see the corpse of a King Cobra draped over his shoulders, the very same shoulders that have saved me twice already. I pray he will save me a third time as those haunting jungle notes are our objective. We will find the enemy, and he will not be us. We may be our own enemies, but we have Jerome.

 

Now Sergeant Wilcox and Lieutenant Goldstein are terrific, but they are not Jerome. Jerome is the pointman. He is all our eyes, all our ears. At a mere twenty-two years old, he is the greatest among us. He carries that dead snake over his shoulders, a venom he faced and bested. He is a snake himself, low, smooth, and venomous. Some would call him a rattler. Jerome is the hand of death to our enemies and the scion of salvation to us wretches. Upon those broad shoulders go the tombstones of a people.

 

Jerome looks back at us from the front of the line, his rifle matte and invisible as the rest of him. He looks back and smiles. He can tell I am �" as well as several other pieces of fresh meat �" nervous. His smile and steady deadly eyes calm us. “Who do you love, baby?” he calls back to us. “Dontcha all worry now. Forty-seven kilcks down, just three to go. Take my hand, man. Jerome’s gonna get us there.”

 

That was when it all went to hell. For the first time in his life, Jerome met a bullet with his name on it. The sniper must have been the luckiest gook in the Mekong, because Jerome never met his charmed shot. As he fell to the ground, the world exploded around us, reason and intelligence vanishing in the space of half a second. Jerome was all of us, the best of us. What hope did we mere mortals have with our Achilles on the ground, never to rise again?

 

I am not a brave man, but I willed myself to crawl through the fire to get to his side. My soul willed me to rescue the soul of us all. As bullets whizzed around I reached his side. He was grave, the weight of his own mortality, a metaphysic tombstone sealing the immortal soldier soul from our world. Even as he laid there, his dying minutes drew me in. He whispered, cold as death: “C’mon man, hand me Arlene. We’ll finish this, give you time to get away.” I picked him up, but he pulled away. “Damn it man, leave me! I’s a dead man! I’m ready fo’ it. Twenty-two years, and my nine lives are up man. This cat’s ready to die, now GO!”

 

To this day, those words will not leave me. I remember the event with such perfect clarity. There’s a tombstone on my chest I cannot remove, weighing me down. It is far heavier than the Silver Star Westmoreland pinned on my chest. Nothing is ever as it seems, especially the actions one calls heroic. If you look at my eyes, you will see things as they are, not as they seem. You will see the tombstone and the anvil of a Silver Star. Jerome did indeed die that day on Death’s tenth shot, but he did not die alone. A piece of every man died that day, and one of us is merely a walking husk of flesh and bone. My soul died that mournful day in the Mekong mud, replaced with weights and measures and the image of a cobra, long thought dead, reawakening to consume his destroyer.