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  In the unearthly silence that followed the chaos, his upside-down frame sagged limply, held aloft only by his seat belt. Jake’s body hung between two friends; his soul between two worlds.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The roaring blast of wild heat knocked Jake Woods back into the Huey hovering over Bien Hoa. It felt like being snapped in the face with a hot wet towel. In training he’d been taught to always strap himself in, but no one did that in Vietnam airspace. This was a different world, with different rules. The dents and nicks on the M-60s mounted on the Huey reminded him how different. When they touched down on the tarmac he felt like an astronaut taking his first step onto the moon.

  The private who grabbed the gear as he got off the chopper told the twenty-four-year-old Jake, “Welcome to the Hilton, Sir.” He was no doubt thinking, One more green officer in charge of guys who know twice as much as he does.

  Jake Woods had heard that ageless private speak these words of greeting in a hundred dreams. Now, twenty-six years later, he heard him speak them again as he lay unconscious in a hospital bed the morning after the accident.

  It was one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming, but it still seems absolutely real. In this case it was real, because it had all happened to Jake before, in a penetrating reality that had forever shaped his life. He watched the dream of that year of his life as one watches a play. The stark reality of it all kept drawing him back in, provoking high pitches of vivid sensation.

  It was night, first night in camp, second in country. Night two of 365. The commercial 707, stripped of all amenities and crammed to capacity, had brought him to this country yesterday, and here he was, a stone’s throw from the mouth of hell. Jake Woods racked out in the bunk but didn’t sleep a wink in the stagnant inferno that was his hooch. Who can sleep in a steam bath? he wondered. Who can sleep with the stench of warm garbage and raw sewage?

  When you’re twenty-four and know you’re about to die you hold on to whatever life is left, even the half life of lying in that pathetic tent. It was three days before Jake really slept, and then from pure exhaustion.

  The siren blasted, as it so often did. Jake saw guys running at the perimeter, jumping into bunkers. He watched himself duck down in his tent, tucking his head low to the ground. Mrs. Green would be proud, he thought. It was she, his high school teacher—not a boot camp instructor—who taught him and Doc and Finney and their peers the fine art of head-tucking, in the air raid drills back in the days of Khrushchev and the Bay of Pigs and the bomb shelter Dad built. He always wondered what difference it would all make when the end finally came.

  Rockets and tracers blistered the sky, and Jake watched air burn as he never knew it could. The mortar barrage curled his toes so bad it cramped his legs, and despite his fit youthful body, he felt like a crippled old man. After he thought it was all over and lifted his head, a piece of shrapnel flew in one side of the tent and out the other, as if to remind him of his mortality. As if Death were saying to him, “Tonight you live—but one day I’ll be back, and nothing will save you from me.” Jake saw that shrapnel in perfect slow motion. The loop had run through his mind hundreds of times. It did again, flawlessly, with its own macabre beauty, as if set to music.

  His first week in Nam a supply clerk pointed him to a crate of ammo. Jake saw him clearly now, his untucked fatigues, glasses, and Southern accent. Most of these guys hailed from places like Sebastopol, Mississippi and Arnoldsville, Georgia. He heard the clerk say the strangest words about the ammo—“Take as much as you want.” The rules really were different here. No meticulous counting of each round. Hand grenades piled on each other like ingredients in a tossed salad. Nothing like the neatly stacked rows at noncombat bases. War seemed neat and tidy until you were in one.

  Looking at the crate filled with grenades, Jake shot the clerk a questioning look. “Yeah, grenades too. Just take whatever you want.” You just take stuff till it runs out? Jake took six grenades. He felt greedy, like he’d taken too large a slice of pie. But coming up one grenade short could cost him his life, or his buddy’s. Now he saw himself toting a Claymore mine as well, its seven hundred steel balls sandwiched between layers of plastic explosives, unbelievably decimating to anyone within range. It was the most effective weapon in Nam.

  The new guys always looked new. They could be older, bigger, wear identical uniforms but they stuck out, walked different, talked different. The veterans walked with steely purpose, alert but not jumpy. The new guys looked at them as if they were gods. Beneath all their mystique and machismo was a nearly impenetrable aura of mutual trust and brotherhood. The perennial greeting “What’s up, bro?” and the familiar backslapping sprung from something deep within. The uninitiated longed to enter into that camaraderie forged only in life and death struggle. But newcomers were on the outside. To get on the inside, they had to prove their mettle. They had to show they were men. On such terms, friendship was won, and once won never lost.

  Young men, if not from Texas or Louisiana, then equally foreign places such as Iowa and Nebraska, with rifles slung over their shoulders, marched across the theater screen of Jake’s mind. Helicopters in Dolby sound served as the audio background. Armies of mosquitoes did perfect little helicopter imitations, using sunbaked soldier flesh as their LZ. Phalanx of black ants and whole battalions of big red fire ants fanned out on the ground. Jake imagined them fighting their own war. In his mind’s eye he saw them hoisting their sand bags, stringing out thimble-sized ribbons of barbed wire, carrying mortars and ammo for their buddies, maybe wearing little ant ear plugs when they fired their artillery. The black ants were friendlies, the red ants hostiles. Or was it the other way around? He got down on his knees to take a closer look.

  “We’re like those ants,” the young man wrote in his journal that quarter of a century ago. “Except we stand on our back legs and trudge clear across this insane jungle of oversized philodendrons and razor sharp elephant grass, pretending to be brave and sometimes convincing ourselves we really are.”

  After a few weeks Jake’s heart descended from constant dread to periodic dread, from red alert to yellow alert. He often wondered, Am I getting braver, or just getting accustomed to being terrified? There was always somebody new coming in, somebody you liked spending time with, because you knew he was more scared than you were, which by comparison made you brave.

  There’s Harvey, from Zionsville, Indiana. “Harvey,” Jake chided. “You look like you shaved blindfolded!” This was what a sergeant said to him the first day he had a run in with a thorn bush. He hadn’t thought it funny then, but got a good laugh out of saying it now. Between mosquitoes and thorns and elephant grass you could be a mass of welts for days. Fortunately, you had things like diarrhea and bleeding feet to take your mind off how impossibly sore your face was. Yet, underneath all the unappealing aspects of this place ran a current of dignity, a nobility. Something every man needed, whether he knew it or not. A reason, a purpose for living, a mission. A cause.

  Jake came here to fight for Dad and Mom and his brother Bryce, and his extended family and friends back home, and the children and grandchildren he’d probably never have precisely because he was here. Now, though, his world shrunk to the thirty men in his platoon. It was reduced to the guy on his right and the guy on his left, guys who reminded him of Doc and Finney. His loftiest dream was no longer a career in journalism, or winning the Pulitzer Prize. It was to keep his buddies and himself alive, survive that day, and to put a year of those twenty-four-hour survivals back to back, to be done and to go home.

  “Twenty-four is a ripe old age here,” Jake wrote Janet, his college sweetheart, whose life was on hold while she waited for her man to come home standing, not in a box, to start a life and a family. The average age of the combat soldier was nineteen. Though as a lieutenant he outranked them, all those nineteen-year-olds had seemed seasoned veterans when Jake first got off the chopper. Once he had a couple of months under his belt, Jake was the veteran, and he exuded a veteran�
�s confidence, partly because he knew he was supposed to.

  Jake watched himself now in his dream, playing poker by moonlight. That dripping blast furnace wound down at midnight just enough to give a hint of relief, only to begin its swing into the fires of hell known as tomorrow. The stench of dead fish and rotting vegetation seemed to ease when the oven turned down. The night sky lit up like fireworks, a surreal Disneyland extravaganza minus Tinker Bell. What would have absorbed your full attention any other place became mundane here. The luminous trail of tracer bullets and explosions in the darkness far outshone the brilliant Northern Lights Jake once saw in Canada. And then it would be morning again, too soon. You were never ready.

  Snakes and insects Jake and Doc and Finney would have used to terrorize every young female in Benton County, here they routinely brushed aside. At first Jake whistled and commented on them, now he just flicked them off and moved on. There was Bilbo, the tree monkey his company adopted. He was the closest thing to Champ, his golden retriever he missed more than he wanted to admit. Bilbo would crawl up Jake’s back, dance on his shoulders, reach out and steal rations from his hand just as they came within inches of his mouth.

  Jake shunned the tempting shortcuts through the vegetation, where VC booby traps killed two men in his platoon, Jim from Oak Ridge and Warren from Port Angeles. The uncertainty of it all plagued him. He saw himself poised, as he had been dozens of times, to shoot the man in the bushes over there, only to discover that moving body was one that slept by him at night.

  He cursed the NVA for not having the decency to stand row by row in bright colorful uniforms, marching in perfect lines to the beat of a drummer, like the British in the Revolutionary War. If only the VC got their training from the Redcoats. It would have been fun, Jake thought, to pick them off one by one as if in target practice. To leisurely call in a 105mm howitzer, give a signal for the war to start, and for once to actually see what you were shooting at. But it would never happen here. Victor Charlie wasn’t civilized like the British of old. He was wily and crafty and unpredictable. Knowing that made the most routine patrol about as relaxing as walking along the six-inch window ledge of a ten-story building. But knowing that was what kept you alive.

  You could scan the horizon with binoculars and never see Charlie, only to look down and watch a bayonet come out your chest, flicking your dog tags up to your mouth to give you one final metallic taste of life in this world. Only once had Jake looked into the eyes of the enemy. There he was now, right in front of him, as real as he’d been so long ago. He could see deep in his eyes, those dark brown eyes frozen forever in his memory. Charlie looked young and dedicated and brave and scared, just like Jake. One would have to kill the other.

  Charlie carried the Russian AK-47, three pounds heavier than Jake’s M-16. The smaller man carrying the larger weapon. Jake always thought that mismatch saved his life, allowing him to move his weapon a fraction of a second faster, hitting Charlie in the chest while his round flew four inches above Jake’s left ear. As he stared at Charlie, watched his life leave him, he wondered about things young men usually leave to philosophers and priests. Where did he go? Where will I go? And when? Does friendship die forever with the friend? Do either survive death? Is there a reason for all this? Will I ever understand?

  There was the captain he’d talked with once at the officer’s club. “On this side of life,” the captain said, “there’s the Old Man, the commander, reviewing the troops. You do your best to please him, don’t you?” Yes, Jake did. Everybody did. “Then there’s the Supreme Commander,” he said. “He’ll review the troops on the other side. Our mission here is to please him, our highest goal to one day be reviewed favorably by him.”

  By now he’d eaten dirt in a couple of firefights. Knowing he could die any day made Jake think about such words. As the captain said, “There are no atheists in fox holes.” But in the years since, these words had lost their interest and urgency. They managed to scale the wall of life’s busyness only when his guard was down, here in his dreams.

  Jake now sat around the campfire, smirking at C-ration labels that sounded like gourmet feasts but always tasted like cardboard casseroles. He could still taste Ham & Lima Beans, half salt, the other half fat, with just enough hidden food particles to make finding them an adventure. He tore the top off a basket, creating a makeshift basketball hoop, then listened to Gordy, Baton Rouge Gordy, play his twelve string Martin. Gordy sang Simon and Garfunkel songs, straining on Garfunkel’s high notes, trying to reach them before getting hit with the usual barrage of catcalls and dirt clods. “A Bridge over Troubled Water.” He could hear it now, as clearly as the first morning song blaring out of a radio alarm clock.

  Bravo Company. It sounded so macho. Sometimes it was. Sometimes Jake felt like a man should feel, like he only feels when he’s spent himself, when he’s dug deep and discovered that when he’s sure he can’t possibly trudge another step, he can go ten more miles. When he’s taken risks and accomplished great feats and come home from the hunt carrying game in his hand and scars on his back, ready to celebrate the conquest. There’s no celebration like the one you’ve earned, Jake thought.

  Jake celebrated in the city, with his buddies, and with the dark-skinned nameless women trafficking and profiteering their only marketable features. Their faces and bodies provided momentary breaks from the ugliness of war. Like his buddies, Jake ignored all the warnings about venereal diseases, even the dreaded “Black Syph,” thinking he’d be grateful living with a disease, if only it meant he would live. It wasn’t that drunkenness and casual sex were so great, it was just that they offered temporary relief from the boredom and the terror. That’s what war seemed sometimes—periods of boredom interrupted by periods of terror.

  Jake heard babies crying. That was the worst. Going through a village and feeling a man’s best instincts, wanting to comfort a crying child. Then realizing you’re carrying an M-16, wearing an ammo belt, and the poor kid is afraid. Looking at old grandmothers and women and children holding their ears and running scared, other times reaching out their arms like they wanted you to pick them up. And you wanted to open your heart and arms to them, but knew they could be VC, that they could kill you, hand you a basket with a live grenade.

  Children. They were here to save these children from the ravages of totalitarianism descending from the north. The war could deliver them, Jake thought, if only they were allowed to win the war. But someone had fixed the rules so they couldn’t win. Meanwhile, children died. Nothing was more tragic than the death of a child. Jake had cause to think about that before the war, and he thought it again there. The death of a child. One could only endure the thought by steeling himself against it, by pretending it hadn’t happened.

  There was Hyuk, Jake’s closest friend among the Montagnards, the original inhabitants of the central highlands, called 2 Corps by U.S. forces. Hyuk was a brave and loyal Yard, strong in ways his slight build never suggested, kind and light-hearted, a lover of life and a lover of his little family. He was the sort that convinced you these people were worth fighting for, even if the reports from back home convinced you American college students weren’t. Hyuk would smile broadly whenever he’d see Jake, and ask him, “Wha’s sup, bro?”

  Hyuk’s son, wife, and mother lived with him in a tiny little hut, reinforced with metal scraps, cardboard, and wood pallets. Mamasan and her young slender daughter-in-law favored Jake with their delicacies, including that rotten fish sauce, the name of which he couldn’t remember. They were warm and generous, good women, loyal to Hyuk and his infant son. One day, ten months into Jake’s tour of duty, the unthinkable happened. While Hyuk was out on patrol, a VC, known locally, fragged Hyuk’s hut, wasting his wife, mother, and son. Then, like a cockroach, he scampered back into the darkness.

  Hyuk returned to discover the madness two days later. He fell to his knees and wept and screamed, and afterward was never the same. He became reckless, took foolish risks, maybe because there was nothing left to
live for. Jake never saw a hint of meanness in Hyuk before, but he got darker and harder, and his big smile became scarce and twisted. One day he disappeared into the jungle by himself, armed to the hilt, and Jake knew why. He was going to find the man, the traitor, who had taken from him the mother who gave him life, the son to whom he gave life, and the wife who was his life. And finding him, Jake had no doubt what he would do to him.

  When Hyuk broke off, Jake knew he would never see him again. He didn’t. He never said good-bye. Hyuk often appeared in Jake’s dreams. He wondered if his Yard friend had managed to take the family-killer with him when he left this world. Jake understood the visceral drive that compelled a man to protect mother and wife and child and to sacrifice anything to extract vengeance on those who ravaged them. This was not mere macho craziness. In the face of such a thing, this was merely SOP—standard operating procedure. It came from deep inside a man and transcended race and culture.

  Jake watched this movie as if for the hundredth time. Except each time was slightly different, a buried memory newly unearthed by one little variation, one slight association not made before, taking him a new direction. He experienced again the magic of mail drop, the chopper coming in a couple times a week with troop replacements and mail bag, the latter even more welcome than the former. The sacred letters, each spread out carefully, some bringing words of joy and hope, others words of grief and broken commitments. Whether flowering love sonnets or “Dear John” letters or just newsy hometown updates and clippings, the letters distracted them from a time and place that cried out for distractions. Jake consumed his letters along with sips of too strong coffee from a tarnished aluminum cup, dinged from jostling in his pack on patrol. He savored every word from home as if each were a drop of dew collected by a man dying of thirst.