Part III: Love
Vietnam is a love and hate relationship for him, he thinks. There's the love part with all the joy and beauty. There's the grandeur of the country and the simplicity of life and the friendliness of many villagers. There's the way some of the nurses smile at him, and the way he flirts back. It almost feels like normal. There's the brotherly love: the bonding between all of them, the way they have to cling on to some—well, any kind of camaraderie they can because they need it. It's a coping mechanism. There's the way Derek will tell an old dirty joke to him over breakfast, and he'll laugh, a deep chortle that comes straight from the belly, like he hasn't heard it a thousand times before (which he has).
There's the hate part with all the war and the blood and violence. There's the fact that no one's really cheerful or happy. Even the nurses put on loads of blush on their cheeks. It's almost as if their bodies are defunct, like their bodies can't produce happy flushes of color anymore. He watches the nurses with their fake rouged up cheeks of happiness tell a soldier about hope, tell him about home, sing him a lullaby, tears in their eyes. His whole goddamn right leg's almost blown apart, but they have no more morphine, so they just sing and cry.
Sometimes, the nurses will grab at his hand and recite some kind of prayer. He wonders if there's even room in his heart for that kind of love anymore. He knows that a lot of people cling to it, that blind faith and love, and know that it will see them through to tomorrow. He can't see it happening to him. It feels like all that's left of him is blood and flesh and hatred and killing. One time, he stole a scalpel from a med. tent, and sat in the grass with Derek, the warm breeze floating over them.
He cut a small line on the top of his arm, and watched a small red line form. Derek had just stared. He didn't even say anything. But he could sense it, and he knew that Derek understood. Best friends or not, they were brothers. They were brothers before they had even enlisted, but they were even more so now. So Derek stared off into the waving grass, and he sat there, holding the scalpel handle, the blade dirty with the rusty color of his blood.
A breeze whistled through the trees.
"I just—I needed some kind of proof to feel alive again, you know?" Derek just nods. "Goddamn, Derek. I needed to see that I still bled like a normal human being. I needed to know that I wouldn't bleed silver—that I hadn't become this complete killing machine."
Derek clears his throat, and answers. "I know," he says, gruffly. "Goddamn, Mark. Sometimes it feels like we're too old."
He stares wistfully out into the waving grasses. "I know," he whispers. There's a long pause, and a rumble of thunder tumbles from cloud to cloud within the small village. Too bad, he thinks. It was so sunny just a second ago. "Like we're termites or something, waiting to be exterminated." If that's not a metaphor for Vietnam, I don't know what is.
One day, he grabs a nurse and goes in the grasses. There's nothing romantic about it. He bites and she scratches and they kiss without kissing, and it's dirty and messy and ugly. Just a bit like Vietnam, he thinks. Maybe they've all become part of the country. She grips at his shoulders and he pulls at her hips. When they finish, he zips up his pants, and she buttons her blouse and straightens her skirt, and they're back to normal. Just two normal people escaping the madness of war. She starts to sob. He doesn't say anything. He just lights a cigarette.
She reaches for it, and takes a long drag. She hands it back.
"Goddamn," he says.
"Fucking right too," she says.
He starts to laugh. "That was the best and the worst sex I've ever had."
She giggles. "Yeah." She starts to sob again, and she reaches blindly for the cigarette. He takes one last selfish, greedy pull before handing it over. "God, I wish it was over."
"What?" He mumbles around the cigarette.
"This whole mess," she says. "I wish this whole goddamn mess was over."
"Don't I know it."
"I should have just become a soldier."
"I don't think they would have let you."
"Fuck that."
"Goddamn." He takes a pull off the cigarette, and holds it out to her, an offering. She shakes her head. "You swear like a sailor."
"Got to," she says. "There's no getting around it. You need to in Hell. There's so much fire around anyway, why wouldn't you?"
"Where you from?"
He stares up at the sky, just whispering words, and listening for whispers back. "Does it matter?"
"Guess not."
"I'm from Oklahoma."
He laughs. "Everyone and their brother is from Oklahoma."
She makes a sound low in her throat. "Where are you from?"
"From everywhere," he says.
"What a cop out."
"Why were you crying before?"
"Sorry about that," she says, as she reaches for the cigarette. "I didn't mean to be so emotional and clingy." He's never heard a woman apologize for that in his lifetime. Well, not without having it be some sort of weird reverse-psychology bullshit, anyway.
"What happened? Your boyfriend die?" She mumbles something that resembles a yes. It's always that the boyfriends die. And the nurses always just patch soldiers up with a lullaby and a prayer, and maybe even a crucifix in the palm, if they're lucky. There's so much floating around in the water, but all the pieces are too small to support yourself on. It's like trying to cling to a notebook for buoyancy. It's not going to work.
"Isn't that how it always works?"
"Yeah. All the men die."
"The good men."
"The bad ones too."
"Aren't they all good in the end?"
"It's not fighting for a glorious cause."
"I know." Tears start to leak from the corners of her eyes. She wipes at them angrily. "Goddamn." He stares at the sky, the clouds looking the same here and at home. "You come here and you think you can make a difference. You come here and you think maybe you can help some poor soldier. What a bunch of shit. Everyone ends up dying anyway."
"Aren't you the cheerful nurse?"
"There was a soldier came in today, his name was Jonas Browning." She sniffles, and pats herself down for a cigarette, his long ago flicked into the grass. "He was so young. Came in, his left leg almost blown to bits. Stepped on a Betty. We didn't have any painkillers left."
"Jesus."
"Can't you see it?" she whispers, something disarming solemn in her voice. "This poor little boy, from Ohio or someplace small, and he comes to fight for a glorious cause. Gets his left leg blown off by a Betty and we don't even have any Tylenol to give the kid. So we—three of the nurses and me—we just grab his hands, and we sing Amazing Grace and Mary Had a Little Lamb and all this other shit we can think of, and he starts crying. He's crying for his mother and his family, and just—goddamn. He was just like my little brother."
"Shit," he says. "It's Vietnam." She gets up, fixes her skirt, leans in to kiss him politely on the cheek, and heads back towards camp.
"Thanks for the cigarette."
"No problem." At mail call, he gets a letter from Addison that night.
She writes to him about what she's doing to fight the war, and how she's fighting for them both. She's fighting so that they can come home. He appreciates it, he really does, because Addie's so sweet and so young. He just doesn't know how he'll fit once he gets back home. He'll be trying to squeeze into different shoes. It just won't work. And he'll have Derek, but what are they going to do? They'll just sit at home and imagine holding machine guns in their hands again, quick-changing magazines, fucking women in the grass. Women that don't matter. Not women like Addie. Not women that love them. Just women. Goddamn women.
He writes something back. He's not sure it makes sense at all, but he tries to keep the pages together, and rereads every so often, making sure to keep his handwriting legible. He writes about Jonas for some reason, writes about the young ones that come to fight out of some manipulated sense of duty, and never end up going back home the same. He writes about the ones that get so easily corrupted by the government or by some force in their lives.
He tries not to write about himself.
He writes about Derek, and writes about how sometimes they sit in the grass and they cut their arms and legs with scalpels. He writes about how she could do a paper on this whole phenomenon. Goddamn coping mechanisms and how they don't actually help you to cope with anything at all. He wants her to do something, to come here, to live through it with them, but he knows that she won't. It's Addison, and he knows her too well.
He signs his letter, "With love." What else is there to say?