The Throat

about the same age. As soon as we took our chairs, five or six men lit cigarettes, including the priest.

'Tonight we have two new faces,' he said, exhaling an enormous cloud of gray smoke, 'and I'd like us to go around the circle, giving our names and units. After that, anybody who has something to say, jump right in.'

Bob, Frank, Lester, Harry, Tim, Jack, Grover, Pee Wee, Juan, Buddy, Bo. A crazy quilt of battalions and divisions. The jumpy little man called Buddy said, 'Well, like some of you guys know from when I was here a couple of weeks ago, I was a truck driver in Cam Ranh Bay.'

I immediately tuned out. This was what I remembered from the veterans' meeting I'd attended four or five years before, a description of a war I never saw, a war that hardly sounded like war. Buddy had been fired from his messenger job, and his girlfriend had told him that if he started acting crazy again, she'd leave him.

'So what do you do when you act crazy?' someone asked. 'What does that mean, crazy?'

'It gets like I can't talk. I just lay up in bed and watch TV all day long, but I don't really see it, you know? I'm like blind and deaf. I'm like in a hole in the ground.'

'When I get crazy, I run,' said Lester. 'I just take off, man, no idea what I'm doin', I get so scared I can't stop, like there's something back there comin' after me.'

Jack, a man in a dark blue suit, said, 'When I get scared, I take my rifle and go up on the roof. It's not loaded, but I aim it at people. I think about what it would be like if I started shooting.'

We all looked at Jack, and he shrugged. 'It helps.'

Father Joe talked to Jack for a while, and I tuned out again. I wondered how soon I could leave. Juan told a long story about a friend who had shot himself in the chest after coming back from a long patrol. Father Joe talked for a long time, and Buddy started to twitch. He wanted us to tell him what to do about his girlfriend.

'Tim, you haven't said anything yet.' I looked up to see Father Joe looking at me with glistening eyes. Whatever he had said to Juan had moved him. 'Is there anything you'd like to share with the group?'

I was going to shake my head and pass, but a scene rose up before me, and I said, 'When I first got to Nam, I was on this graves registration squad at Camp White Star. One of the men I worked with was called Scoot.' I described Scoot kneeling beside Captain Havens' body bag, saying He nearly got in and out before I could pay my respects, and told them what he had done to the body.

For a moment no one spoke, and then Bo, one of the men in clothing assembled from old uniforms, said, 'There's this thing, this place I can't stop thinking about. I didn't even see what the hell happened there, but it got stuck in my head.'

'Let it out,' said the priest.

'We were in Darlac Province, way out in the boonies, way north.' Bo leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. 'This is gonna sound a little funny.' Before Father Joe could tell him to let it out again, he tilted his head and glanced sideways in the circle at me. 'But what, Tim? what Tim said reminded me. I mean, I never saw any American do that kind of junk, and I hate it when people talk like that's all we ever did. You want to make me crazy, all you gotta do is tell me about so-called atrocities we did over there, right? Because personally, I never saw one. Not one. What I did see, what I saw plenty of times, was Americans doing some good for the people over there. I'm talking about food and medicine, plus helping kids.'

Every man in the circle uttered some form of assent—we had all seen that, too.

'Anyhow, this one time, it was like we walked into this ghost town. The truth is, we got lost, we had this lieutenant fresh out of training, and he just got lost, plain and simple. He had us moving around in a big circle, which he was the only one who didn't understand what we were doing. The rest of us, we said, fuck it, he thinks he's a leader, let him lead. We get back to base, let him explain. So we're out there three-four days, and the lieutenant is just beginning to get the picture. And then we start smelling this fire.'

'Like an old fire, you know? Not like a forest fire, like a burning building. Whenever the wind comes in from the north, we smell ashes and dead meat. And pretty soon, the smell is so strong we know we're almost on top of it, whatever it is. Now the lieutenant has a mission, he can maybe save his ass if he brings back something good— hell, it doesn't even have to be good, it just has to be something he can bring back, like he was looking for it all along. So we hump along through the jungle for about another half hour, and the stench gets worse and worse. It smells like a burned-down slaughterhouse. And besides that, there's no noise around us, no birds, no monkeys, none of that screeching we heard every other single day. The jungle is deserted, man, that fucker's empty, except for us.'

'So in about half an hour we come up to this place, and we all freeze—it isn't a hamlet, it isn't a ville, it's out in the jungle, right? But it looks like some kind of town or something, except most of it's burned down, and the rest of it is still burning. You could tell from the charred stakes that there used to be a big stockade fence around it— some of it's still sticking up. But we can see this goddamn grid, with little tiny lots and everything, where these people had their huts all lined up on these narrow streets. All this was straw, I guess, and it's gone—there's nothing left but holes in the ground, and some flooring here and there. And the bodies.'

'Lots of bodies, lots and lots of bodies. Someone pulled a lot of them into a big pile and tried to burn them, but all that happened was they split open. These were all women and children, and a couple old men. Yards—the first Yards I ever saw, and they're all dead. It looked like that Jonestown, that Jim Jones thing, except these bodies had bullet holes. The stink was incredible, it made your eyes water. It looked like someone had all these people stand in a big ring and then just blasted them to pieces. We didn't say a word. You can't talk about what you don't understand.'

'At the far end of this place, there's part of a mud wall and a lot of blood on the ground. I saw a busted-up M-16 lying next to a big iron cookpot hung up over a burned-out fire. Somebody had did a job on that M-16. They busted the stock right off, and the barrel was all bent out of true. I looked into the cookpot and wished I hadn't even thought of it. Through the froth on top, I could see bones floating down in this kind of jelly, this soupy jelly. Long bones, like leg bones. And a rib cage.'

'And then I saw what I really didn't want to see. Next to the pot was a baby. Cut in half—just sliced in half, right across the belly. There was maybe a foot of ground between the top half and the bottom half, where his guts were. It was a boy. Maybe a year old. And he wasn't any ordinary Yard baby, because he had blue eyes. And his nose was different—straight, like ours.'

Bo knotted his hands together and stared at them. 'It was like we were killing our own, you know? Like we were killing our own. I couldn't take it anymore. I said to myself, This is too weird, all I'm doing from now on is concentrating on getting out of this place. I said, I'm through with seeing things. This right here is it. I said, From now on, all I'm doing is following orders—man, I'm already done.'

Father Joe waited a second, nodding like a sage. 'Do you feel better about this incident, now that you've told the group about it?'

'I don't know.' Bo retreated into himself. 'Maybe.'

Jack hesitantly raised his hand a couple of inches off his lap. 'I don't want to keep going up on my roof. Could we talk about that some more?'

'You never heard of willpower?' Lester asked.

The meeting broke up a little while later, and Bo disappeared almost instantly. I helped Harry and Frank stack the chairs while Father Joe told me how much I'd gotten out of the meeting. 'These feelings are hard to let go of. Lots of times I've seen men experience things they couldn't even grasp until a couple of days went by.' He put a hand on my shoulder. 'You might not believe this, Tim, but something happened to you while Bo was sharing with us. He reached you. Come back soon, will you, and let the others help you get through it?'

I said I'd think about it.

6

When I opened the door to my loft, the red light on the answering machine flashed like a beacon in the darkness, but I ignored it and went into the kitchen, turning on lights along the way. I couldn't even imagine wanting to talk to anyone. I wondered if I would ever know the truth about anything at all, if the actual shape of my life, of other lives too, would ever remain constant. What had really happened in Bachelor's encampment? What had John met there and what had he done? I made myself a cup of herbal tea, carried it back into the main part of the loft, and sat down in front of the paintings that had been shipped from