Rainfall

I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to let it out.

What’s with you? I thought. Do you want to drive her away?

Yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe that would be best. I couldn’t tell her about her father, but I could tell her something worse.

When I spoke, my voice was dry and steady. “Atrocities, Midori. I’m talking about atrocities.”

Always a good conversation starter. But she stayed with me. “I don’t know what you did,” she said, “but I know it was a long time ago. In another world.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t make you understand, not if you weren’t over there.” I pressed my fingertips to my eyes again, the reflex useless against the images playing in my mind.

“A part of me loved it, thrived on it. Operating in the NVA’s backyard, not everybody could do that. Some guys, when they’d hear the insert helicopters going off into the distance and the jungle go quiet, they’d panic, they couldn’t breathe. Not me. I had over twenty missions in Indian country. People would say I had used up all my luck, but I just kept going, and the missions kept getting crazier.

“I was one of the youngest One-Zeros — SOG team leaders — ever. My teammates and I were tight. We could be twelve guys against an NVA division, and I knew that not one of my people would run. And they knew I wouldn’t, either. Do you know what that’s like, for a kid who’s been ostracized his whole life because he’s a half-breed?”

I talked faster. “I don’t care who you are. If you wade that deeply into the blood and muck, you won’t stay clean. Some people are more susceptible than others, but eventually everyone goes over the edge. Two of your people are blown in half by a Bouncing Betty mine, their legs torn from their bodies. You’re holding what’s left of them in the last moments of their lives, telling them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay, you’re going to be okay,’ they’re crying and you’re crying and then they’re dead. You walk away, you’re covered with their insides.

“You lay your own booby traps for the enemy — that was one of our specialties, tit for tat — but there are only twelve of you and you can’t win that kind of war of attrition no matter how much more you bleed them than they bleed you. You take more losses, and the frustration — the rage, the strangling, muscle-bunching rage — just builds and builds. And then one day, you’re moving through a village with the power of life and death slung over your shoulder, sweeping back and forth, back and forth, muzzle forward. You’re in a declared free-fire zone, meaning anyone who isn’t a confirmed friendly is assumed to be Vietcong and treated accordingly. And intel tells you this village is a hotbed of V.C. activity, they’re feeding half the sector, they’re a conduit for arms that are flowing south down the Trail. The people are giving you sullen looks, and some mama-san says, ‘Hey, Joe, you fuck mommie, you number ten,’ some shit like that. I mean, you’ve got the intel. And two hours earlier you lost another buddy to a booby trap. Believe me, someone is going to pay.”

I took two deep breaths. “Tell me to stop, or I’m going to keep going.”

Midori was silent.

“The village was called Cu Lai. We herded all the people together, maybe forty or fifty people, including women and children. We burned their homes down right in front of them. We shot all their farm animals, massacred the pigs and cows. Effigy, you know? Catharsis. But it wasn’t cathartic enough.

“Now what are we supposed to do with these people? I used the radio, even though you’re not supposed to because the enemy can triangulate, they can find your position. But what were we supposed to do with these people? We had just destroyed their village.

“The guy on the other end of the radio, I still don’t know who, says, ‘Waste ’em.’ This was the way we described killing back then — so and so got wasted, we wasted ten V.C.

“I’m quiet, and the guy says again, ‘Waste ’em.’ Now this is unnerving. It’s one thing to be on the brink of hot- blooded murder. It’s another to have the impulse coolly sanctioned higher up the chain of command. Suddenly I’m scared, realizing how close we had been. I say, ‘Waste who?’ He says, ‘All of ’em. Everybody.’ I say, ‘We’re talking about forty, fifty people here, some women and children, too. Do you understand that?’ The guy says again, ‘Just waste ’em.’ ‘Can I have your name and rank?’ I say, because suddenly I’m not going to kill all these people just because a voice over the radio tells me to. ‘Son,’ the voice says, ‘I assure you if I told you my rank you’d shit your pants for me. You are in a declared free-fire zone. Now do as I say.’

“I told him I wouldn’t do it without being able to verify his authority. Then two more people, who claimed to be this guy’s superiors, got on the radio. One of them says, ‘You have been given a direct order under the authority of the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Obey this order or suffer the consequences.’

“So I went back to the rest of the unit to talk this over. They were guarding the villagers. I told them what I had just heard. For most of the guys, it had the same effect it had on me: it cooled them down, scared them. But some of them it excited. ‘No fucking way,’ they were saying. ‘They’re telling us to waste ’em? Far out.’ Still, everyone was hesitating.

“I had a friend, Jimmy Calhoun, who everyone called Crazy Jake. He hadn’t been contributing much to the conversation. All of a sudden he says, ‘Fucking pussies. Waste ’em means waste ’em.’ He starts yelling at the villagers in Vietnamese. ‘Get down, everybody on the ground! Num suyn!’ And the villagers complied. We were fascinated, wondering what he was going to do. Jimmy doesn’t even slow down, he just steps back, shoulders his rifle, then ka-pop! ka-pop! he starts shooting them. It was weird; no one tried to run away. Then one of the other guys yells ‘Crazy fuckin’ Jake!’ and shoulders his rifle, too. The next thing I knew we were all unloading our clips into these people, just blowing them apart. Clip runs out, press, slide, click, you put in a new clip and fire some more.”

My voice was still steady, my eyes fixed straight ahead, remembering. “If I could go back in time, I would try to stop it. I really would. I wouldn’t participate. And the memories dog me. I’ve been running for twenty-five years, but in the end, it’s like trying to lose a shadow.”

There was a protracted silence, and I imagined her thinking, I slept with a monster.

“I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said, confirming my suspicions.

I shrugged, feeling empty. “Maybe it’s better that you know.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s an upsetting story. Upsetting to hear what you’ve been through. I never thought of war as so . . . personal.”

“Oh, it was personal. On both sides. There were special medals for NVA — North Vietnamese Army soldiers — who killed an American. A severed head was the proof. If it was a SOG man you killed, you’d get an extra ten