it meant an American was taking a drag. It felt the same as I watched Mama Snow’s house from the cab of my truck. Sitting in the dark, waiting for something bad to happen.
I couldn’t think about Vietnam without thinking of the ambush. It was in that ambush that I should have died. Instead, I became a monster. It was a triple-canopy jungle. The sunlight reaching the ground was scarce, and further obstructing our field of vision were patches of bamboo and elephant grass. Those conditions alone were terrifying. Every nook and cranny was a potential hiding place, every anthill a potential airhole for the tunnels that were probably running directly under us. Cambodia was just a handful of hours west on foot, we were that close. We were knee high in mud and foliage, a few miles away from where they wanted us camped that night.
It started off with Chandler’s head getting blown off.
As his limp body tilted and fell to the wet earth, we all ran for cover because we didn’t know where the shot had come from. We set our rifles to rock and roll and began spraying the green hell to our front.
Before long, we figured out there was more than one sniper. There were at least two. Shots started raining down on us from different directions. We didn’t know where was safe, and everyone was screaming.
The second man to die was the radio man, Talbot. The enemy always went after the radio man. More so than a commander, the radio man was the prime target. Talbot caught one in the thigh, and he started screaming, dragging himself through the brush so someone could relieve him of the radio. Someone ran over to him to get the radio off him. As long as there was one man alive, that radio was more important than bullets. It was the only way to let anyone know where we were and that we were under attack. This was a fucking ambush.
Baxter—who made the run to get the radio—lost his jaw in a plume of gore. I had never seen anything like it, a man with a surprised expression in his eyes, and everything below his nose just a deep, red hole. Blood pouring out like puke from a mouth-less cave. His eyes asked if he was okay, and then he just curled up in a ball and died. Didn’t make a sound.
As that was going on, Conrad caught one in the shoulder, and Talbot caught another one in or close to his liver. We fired into the trees, and the sergeant kept screaming for someone to get on the horn so we could get some air support. By this time, Talbot was dead. In all, he got hit three or four times. Conrad was dead. Chandler was dead. Baxter. We lost four men in no more than five minutes.
The radio was sitting there in the dirt. We set off some smoke for cover, and this other guy, Morris, made a move for the radio. He went down hard, and when the smoke cleared, the radio was toast. Shattered and lost in a hail of bullets, like us.
Night fell. We couldn’t hardly see the man in front of us. We were trapped like fish in a barrel. Every once in a while, someone would shuffle in his little cove, his few square feet of cover, and shots would ring out. Tracers from the treetops.
Vietnamese snipers lived up in those trees for God knows how long. It was their land, and it was in their blood, and they knew every inch of it. We were like parasites out there, getting picked off one by one for our trespasses. The sergeant ordered us not to talk because the snipers knew how the sound bounced in the
jungle.
As the hours went on, we resorted to throwing stones out into the night. Shots would ring out, and tracers would mark a trail through the darkness. When we thought we saw where these shots came from, we’d let loose with our rifles, but it was almost more dangerous shooting our guns because of the small flashes of burning powder that would ejaculate from our weapons when they discharged.
We lost Poe, and we lost Wells after that.
Wells died slowly, from a gutshot, and he kept moaning and crying for his mother.
“Please, Hooper, I want my momma. Oh, God, man, it hurts!”
He was twenty years old. He kept screaming, and Sergeant Hooper started to crack up. He kept whispering to the kid, “You’re going to give us away, you sonofabitch.”
When the kid wouldn’t shut up, the sergeant whispered, “Someone give him a fucking shot.”
No one knew where the shots were, the morphine. They were probably on one of the bodies, so the sergeant made the decision to have someone shoot Wells, to put him down for the good of the men. I’d later learn that wolves in the wilderness have the same policy for sick members of the pack.
No one made a move to shoot Wells.
Wells kept screaming, “I don’t wanna die, I wanna go home!”
The sergeant shot him, and then Wells just moaned. The sergeant shot him again and again until he didn’t make any more noises.
A few minutes later, we heard a lone shot, and when someone called out for Hooper, he didn’t answer.
That’s when our worst fears became a reality. Our only hope was Charlie Company coming to look for us, but we knew it wouldn’t happen until first light. We were on our own, and I doubt anyone thought we’d make it through the night. I can’t communicate the feeling of what it’s like being surrounded by boys—being just a boy yourself—and knowing that it’s only a matter of time until you and everyone you know is going to die. Everyone started whispering prayers. In the distance, the dark, we could almost hear the snipers laughing at us.
I didn’t pray. I thought of Doris.
Unbeknownst to me, my father had died a day earlier. He’d been hit by a bus backing into a space on the lot where he worked. He was rushed to the hospital, and spent the better part of his last day on earth in the intensive-care unit. Anyone else caught under the wheels of that bus would have died instantly. It takes an extraordinary amount of punishment to kill a Higgins man, and getting crushed under the bus was enough, but my father lived long enough to talk to his wife, and to pray that his only son was already dead. In a cruel twist of fate, I wasn’t. And then my father died.
From the moment he died to the time that I myself was trapped and waiting to die, the spirit of the wolf crossed continents, perhaps as an invisible specter, or as a fast-moving storm cloud, and came to me in that jungle. I wonder if it watched me as I cowered there in that narrow ditch where water once flowed. I wonder if it laughed at the fear I had of my own mortality. Out in the jungle, the glare of the full moon barely came through the blanket of trees that shielded us from that exquisite, damning light. The only thing we could see were the tracers that got fired at us every few rounds.
I had my arms around Ritter, and he had his arms around me, and there we were—huddled down and waiting to die. We didn’t want to die alone. No one does. You can have your friends and the people you didn’t get along with, but when the pearly gates are in your sights, everyone’s on the same team and you have to be brothers.
Men were crying. Someone whispered Ritter’s name, and Ritter lifted his head up just a fraction of an inch. A subconscious reaction to his name being called through the silence.
Shots rang out. A tracer burned a brilliant hole through his cheek, and before his head exploded, it seemed to glow from the inside out like a jack-o’-lantern. His head literally exploded like a ripe melon. The smell of burning hair filled my nostrils, and Ritter’s hot blood washed over me like a wave. A spilled drink. I could feel it in my eyes, and I could taste it in my mouth. I breathed in deep, and let out a bloodcurdling scream.
Ritter’s body fell against me, and I pushed it away. I pushed it away as if the death that had infested it, had consumed it and claimed it, would wash off on me. Like it would contaminate me and I would be the next to die.
I jumped up like I was on fire. I had to run. There was nowhere to run, but that was the moment that the combat broke me. I couldn’t even think like a man anymore. The force guiding my legs to run belonged to an older, more primitive urge.
The men began to shout. “Higgins, get down!”
I couldn’t respond. Language wasn’t mine to use anymore. I felt hands pull at my pant legs, but these feelings just produced more fear. In my mind, they were the hands of the dead trying to pull me into hell.
More shots rang out—many—and I felt a bullet rip through the meat between my neck and my shoulder. My arm went hot and dead. More hot blood hit me in the face, only this time it was mine.
I instantly felt the loss of blood. My frantic steps stopped, and I fell to my knees. I felt like I had never felt anything else in my life before that, even the heavenly touch of my Doris. In a way, nothing had ever been more real than that gunshot, or more meaningful. In front of me, tracers zipped past my ears and burrowed holes into a tree. Strips of burning bark flew through the air like sparks. In that darkness it looked like a fireworks display. I was entranced, just … lost up there in my headspace. I threw my head back and cried.
