Vietnam was hot. But it wasn't the heat that killed you, it was the humidity. Or the grenades. It's on days like these, the quiet ones, that make you think. Sometimes, he squats—he doesn't sit anymore because Vietnam is littered with mines and shit—and looks around. There are nurses here who work with the doctors, and he likes to think that give or take a couple years, he could have been one of the doctors here. But the girls here aren't like the girls at home. They're harder, more masculine. He bites down on his cigarette, letting the smoke waft around him. You almost have to be harder in an environment like this, he thinks. He's not the teenager he was when he came.
Derek and he are still friends. Vietnam hasn't touched that. They enlisted together because they stood for principles like honor and duty. They wanted to help. Vietnam is different than he imagined. It's not full of just the enemy. They don't get bombed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes it's like that, but not all of the time. He's even learned a little Vietnamese.
But it's on days like these that life sucks. It was a quiet day too. It's always quiet when these things happen. It was just a slight whistling; it could have been the fucking Andy Griffith Show theme song. It wasn't that the explosion was loud. It wasn't loud, it was practically silent. It was the pressure that you felt, the heat that burned you even though you were twenty-five feet away. It was the sight of the tent burning, the red cross flap flickering somewhere in the breeze. "Fuck," he says, and he crawls to his feet. The first thing he does is to check to see if Derek's okay, and then they're running towards the tent, because they were med. students.
The patients who have survived are in worse condition. Some of the nurses have horrible burns, and they don't know what happened to the doctors. They had to have died. Damn VC, he thinks. He and Derek grab whatever they can. He never thought he'd ever do this, but medical supplies are hard to come by. So Derek is treating the wounded and he's rummaging through the clothes of all the dead medical personnel he can find, and throws whatever he finds at Derek. Gauze. Bandages. Antiseptic. Anything.
They fix them up as best as they can and wait for the chopper. He squats and smokes a cigarette, lighting it on a shrub along the brush that's caught fire. He squats next to Derek and they talk. "Goddamn," he says, breathing the calming smoke. If he closes his eyes, he almost sees bars in New York, pollution in LA, the goddamn United States.
"Tell me about it," Derek says. He thinks they could be in high school, if it weren't for the bombs and the choppers and the guns.
"VC," he says. "Hit up our goddamn med. tent."
"I know." There's nothing to say anymore except "goddamns" and "I knows" because war is all about this. It's about knowing what you need to know half a second too late, but expecting yourself to know it anyway. It's about heaving loads, the physical, the spiritual, the memories of home, and letting yourself trek through a foreign land carrying all of that and still expecting to survive. It's about napalm and Agent Orange and guerilla warfare. It's about New York and girlfriends and alcohol.
Their CO tells them to pack up their things, that they have to move. Sometimes he likes to think of the people in charge as his parents, directing troops one way or another, and guessing where the VC are hiding. But they're fighting on enemy turf, and chances aren't good. He takes another puff off the cigarette and tosses it on the ground, stubbing it out with his boot. He heaves up his pack, feels his shoulders lurch forward, and falls into the pack. Derek follows him.
War is such a crock, he thinks. You think about honor and duty and fighting for your country when you go off, and when you get there, it's about killing the enemy and staying alive. He tries not to think about the odds or what he would've been doing back home if he had never enlisted. He just smokes a cigarette and squats in the grass. He hasn't killed a man yet. Derek did.
He remembers it too. Sometimes, he squats in the grass and tries not to think about how Derek was before the war. How he was before the war. It's too sad, he thinks. That day had been quiet too. Some VC had wandered away from his troop and had been meandering through the fields. He found himself opposite Derek. Derek who wanted to save lives. Derek who used to smile a lot. Derek who had pulled the pin and lobbed the grenade before the other guy had. Derek who had watched the man half-smile before the grenade exploded at his feet. Derek who had stared at the body for a half an hour before moving. Derek who stopped smiling. He tries not to think about that Derek.
They march through Vietnam, stepping on grass and shit and trying to avoid mines. Mark never killed a man, but he saw a man die. And he doesn't know if killing is worse or if they're both the same. Either way, he thinks with a smile, it fucks a man up. They're marching through and Frank LeBouche, a twenty-year-old from Texas, grins at him one minute when something flies from the field. It lands by his feet. Smiling one minute, flesh and bones the next. Mark forgets if he had gotten blood on his shoe. So they all drop to the ground and start shooting. They shoot at the field. He stares at the grass blowing in the wind as he empties his magazine. There's no one there, he thinks. Hopeless, he thinks.
Two weeks later, and he's writing a letter to Addison. He doesn't know why. She's Derek's girlfriend, but he needs a friend. Someone other than Derek. He doesn't remember what happened. Derek who killed a man and never smiled and Mark who watched a man die and realizes it's a lost cause. His thoughts fly from his brain to the ballpoint pen, and it's messy and convoluted, and he's pretty sure it doesn't make sense. He's pretty much just babbling, but he needs to babble. And in the end, in the last sentence, he asks for a small picture of her because he could use a little luck.
Some of the guys have religion. Some have girlfriends. He doesn't even have family.