AN: I wrote this for a literature class project. I don't own the characters. Warning: this does have some swear words and a bit of blood.
It's so hot.
It's always hot here, in this stinking jungle, but right now the air could just boil your skin off. We've switched to a nocturnal schedule. Yep, living the night life, that's us. It's supposed to throw the other guys off our trail, you know? But the thing is, I don't think it's gonna work. I don't think it's got a chance in hell at working. They can move in this god-forsaken jungle, day or night, while the best we can do is blunder along through the undergrowth. And it's all for nothing too. We all know the report about a NVA buildup is just bogus. It's been a solid week, and not one of us has seen a single lick of a VC anywhere. If anyone were to know first, I think it'd be us, on the ground. All we've been seeing is the bugs. Damn huge bugs, too. Might as well be mutant. The other guys must think I'm crazy, talking about mosquitoes with mutant DNA, but I tell you that in this place it could just be true. I've heard stories of stranger things happening here. Told a few of them myself. You don't really notice it in the day, but at night this place just comes alive. It's like we're standing on top of some huge beating heart, only no one can hear it. The only way the sound comes through is from the buzz of insect and the calls of the animals. It's so dead silent in the day, but when you're walking at night everything just goes crazy.
I don't know if I'll be able to get used to this.
Sanders says I need to chill. Says I'm too strung out over nothing. Well goddamn it I'm the medic, I'm the one who has to slice through human flesh with a steady hand. I can't be popping NoDoz anytime I damn well please just to take off the edge. And anyway, just a few days ago he was saying I was too quiet.
That's the thing with Vietnam. It's so loud if you really try to listen. The hum of those nasty little bloodsuckers never goes away. Last night I counted 15 bites. It's worse for me than it is for them, you see, because I know. I know all the diseases you could get from just one bite. They taught us that, every stinking thing you can get here. Malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, epidemic polyarthritis, Rift Valley fever, Ross River Fever. But it's not just the whining of the bugs. There are other noises too, when you're walking single file through a black jungle. Up above, you can hear the monkeys hoot and chatter, like they're talking to each other in code. Maybe that's how the VC always know where we are. Because those damn monkeys give our position away.
It's not just my imagination, though. Ever since we switched over I've been getting more and more bites. I count too. It's a damn feeding frenzy out here, and we're the banquet. Sometimes I think how we're almost dead already, and then I can feel the maggots under my skin, crawling their way through the fatty upper layers of the epidermis. Big white squiggly things, burrowing, wriggling through my skin. I know I've started scratching at them, trying to dig them out, and all the boys give me the crazy looks. But a guy's gotta do what he's gotta do, right?
Had another dream last night. Or maybe they're all just continuations of the same long drawn out dream. But either way it was about a body part.
I was sitting there, looking at this liver in my hands. It sat in my palms and crept up over my fingers, a triangle slab of gelatinous plum-colored flesh. It felt cold and warm, all at the same time, and I'd never held a liver before, not really. I remember studying it, fascinated by the rubbery texture, the dark purple color. And somehow I knew that it was my liver. I knew that if I looked down I'd find a deep hole on the right side of my torso, where I had to dig in to reach it. There would be blood pulsing out of the wound, running down the front of my uniform, staining the fabric. It's hard to get blood out of fabric, you really have to scrub. There might be a few ribs on the ground in front of me from where I snapped them off. Pale white, shinning, strings of red running down their length. The ribcage protects the liver, encases it completely. Stomach and gallbladder too. I didn't look down but I didn't have to. I could feel it, a hole inside of me, slowly sucking in and out, running blood. I wonder what I used to do it, though. Probably not a scalpel. Maybe my bare hand, ripping into flesh with my fingernails and cracking the ribs in the way, yanking them out. Very unprofessional, even out in this hell hole.
Before the war I used to read a lot. Any sort of book would do as long as it was in English. I'm a bit of a storyteller myself. I tell the guys all the best ones I know. Like Mary Anne. Which was a true story, I swear to god. It's just that, out here, all my stories seem to get…amplified. Like maybe when I told it to the guys it just wanted to come out bigger and better than before, so I may have embellished a little. Like how she really wasn't anyone's girlfriend. And how she worked for the Red Cross. And that her name wasn't Mary Anne. It was Just Mary. "Just Mary," she'd say whenever we tried to ask and then she'd smile, real quick and cute, but that smile could cut through the dark like a lightning bolt. Fossie fell in love with her. We all did. She wasn't all innocent like I made her out to be in the beginning. She came to do her job, and did it damn well. She didn't wear pink. But she was a woman and she was beautiful and she got caught up in all the shit that's Vietnam. She took off that golden cross she wore and put on those tongues. We lost her out there just like I could lose anyone here. And that, goddamn it, is the truth.
I don't know why I'm writing this. I mean, I know all of this stuff, up in my head. So why the hell should I be writing it down? Maybe I'm gonna lose my head soon. Maybe that's why. Like the one dream I had with Jim Cross. Cracked his skull open like a watermelon.
Goddamn Sanders. Thinks he's some high shit storyteller. What's the point, what's the point, what's the goddamn point? Why does everything have to have a point? Why can't it just be a story?
I don't care if it's got a point to it, I just want to read it, absorb it, suck it in. Read all the classics, and all that cheap junk too. But I always liked Shakespeare. That guy, now, he could tell a story. And it would have a point too. But he wouldn't throw it in your face. He would just say it and that's it. You go figure it out now. And I always did.
Hamlet was one of the best. I always got a kick out of the poor guy going nuts. But now that I think about it, even that poor sucker had a point. He was real smart, because he saw, understood, what I had to come out to Vietnam to get. We're all food for maggots in the end. It doesn't matter who we are or where we died or what we did. We all end up in the ground with maggots tunneling through our flesh. The most advanced creature on this earth, food for the flies.
It hit me like a thunderbolt just today, and I can't believe it took me so long. I finally get the point. And you know what it is? It's the silence in the day and the chatter in the night. It's the mosquitoes and the maggots. It's Mary Anne. She got it too, way before us all. She was on the next wavelength, you know? And now I see it too. Sanders doesn't. He doesn't get the point. He keeps asking 'what's the point, what's the point' because he doesn't really get it. He keeps expecting every story to have a different reason, a different point. But here's the thing: they're all the same.
They're all the damn same. And it's this.
I had a dream again. Another one of those bloody ones, with the body parts. This time it was a foot, my foot, with a hole straight through the middle. It didn't even hurt.