Remembering Nam

        I've always tried to bury my past. For years the war plagued me, I could not escape the haunting images, they followed me, even when I slept. When visiting day would come I would get hassled by my grand children, "Grandpa, Grandpa, tell us about the war in Vietnam. Yeah, tell us about your friends and the all good stuff! they'd yell. Their young, little minds were eager, hungry for stories they could later boast about, to their friends.

        How was I suppose to tell them about the burning heat, the blood, the bodies, the God-awful smell? How was I suppose to explain to them that war was absolute Hell? They're all so young, too young to understand. I would improvise instead, sugar coat things, make the war sound as if it had been easy. I could see the moment they became disinterested, the twinkle in their eyes had vanished. I sat on my rocking chair and started to daydream, I had flashbacks to the days of my service in the war, 1973.

...

        The scorching heat turned the ground into an endless grill, the sun acted as the fire beneath, burning at full force. Even with the thick, leather boots, my  troop and I could feel the heat seeping through, burning our feet. On a particularly hot day we had run out of water and stopped to drink from a seemingly clean stream... By the end of the day we were all feeling the effects of the contaminated water. It had only lasted a couple of days but by the end of it, we were all on edge. Each of us dealing with our own personal battles and  the demons were getting the best of us. We made up for our internal battles by blowing up whatever poor bastard happened to cross our path, innocent or not. One second he was there, the next he wasn't. He'd be dead. Gone. Blown up. History. His only remains were the various body parts raining down on us as we marched, covered in bloody chunks of body parts and internal organs, stomping on them the way a small child stomps the leaves on the ground.

        Jim was a character, a real wild guy. Then there was Aaron and Jamal, the twins, despite them being colored folks, they were great. Manny was a real pal, quiet but also very intelligent. Who could forget Vinny, he was the guy you wanted to partner up with during the night patrols. Then there was Lucian, the old man, he wasn't really old but he was the wisest.

         Jim. He was the soldier any enemy prayed not to cross paths with. One day something inside of him snapped. He couldn't handle the nights as well of the rest of us. He more than made up for his issues and insecurities when it came time to battle. He took pleasure in the kill. He was a sugar crazed kid turned loose in a candy shop. For every person one of our men killed, Jim had a pile of bloody, dismembered corpses lying behind him. We always described Jim as being the detonator, waiting for someone to set it off. He was the first to strike and the last one to stop killing, sometimes I would watch him in action. Watching him fight was like watching a hyperactive kid running around, having the time of his life, he'd slice some people in half and the others, he'd use for target practice. Jim was always a mystery but the one thing you could always count on him doing was acting as if nothing had happened, the very next day.

...

        The sun had just started to poke up from behind the horizon, the sky was all shades of blue with hints of purple and pink. It would be morning soon. That day was the first time Vinny lost his usually calm composure. We were headed to a notoriously marshy part of Vietnam, the Chi River. It was a particularly hot day and we had been marching for quite a while. Jim had been full of complaints that day and Vinny looked as though he was about to explode.

"It smells like horse shit!" Jim said, more than frustrated.

"What do you expect? We're not on some magical, yellow, brick road! Why don't you just shut up and quit your complaining, stupid," Vinny said.

They both continued to argue and soon tried outperform each other, but both stopped once the smell hit them. It hit all of us, one by one, as if we had crossed an invisible threshold. The stench was far worse than the horse shit, our gag reflexes were provoked and for the first time Jim had nothing to say. His face was puffed up like a blow-fish, as if trying to use the little facial hair he had as a protective mask. He held his breath, trying not to inhale the foul fumes. As we walked, Jim let out a huge gasp, not because he had run out of air, but because we had discovered the source of the smell. Men, dead bodies really, some were missing body parts, others were sliced down the middle with their guts spilling out and some were burned beyond recognition. "ARVN" was carved across their foreheads, not an I.D., a signature. These men were our men, fallen comrades, KIA. Then I saw the burned, now charcoal colored bracelet I was all too familiar with. The red and blue proudly shining through, I knew who it had belonged to instantly. It was Manny's, our doctor, the smart one of the group. There he lay, dead. All of his hopes, dreams, and talents, gone. Shot and burned right out of him.

        Manny, Jamal and Aaron, and Lucian had set out two days earlier, ahead of us, in response to a cry for help from another one of our troops, nearby. Kind-hearted Manny always willing to help those in need, our only doctor, dead. Gone. Lucian, the guy who always knew what top say, the glue that held us together. Lucian the wise and Manny's best friend, our RTO, dead. Cut open and shot in the heart, a gruesome murder but his expression was calm and peaceful, at one with God. His body was a bloody mess but his soul was pure as always and happily heading home. Jamal and Aaron, who were once filled with energy and brute force, dead. Even their bodybuilding physique and witt could not save them. Jamal and Aaron were the only two black soldiers in our troop, they weren't inferior to us, they were our equals and on many occasions they were our saviors.

        While the shock subsided, Jim took it upon himself to radio the chopper, he'd completely forgotten about the smell. When the choppers arrived, reality set in and we all cried like little bitches, only this time it was as if we had been given permission to do so from some divine source. Manny, Lucian, Jamal and Aaron, and the others were airlifted and taken away. They were replaced by new soldiers, fresh meat, most likely straight out of high school. Nothing was ever the same, from that point on we fought on until the war was over. We were machines, our humanity had been taken away, along with the bodies of our brothers.