we didn’t know this yet. So I’m crawling, feeling with my hands. Mason is with me, but he has this thing about snakes and won’t crawl unless he’s ordered to. So he’s sort of bent over, following next to me. Both of us are trying to use the light from mortars and rockets to watch ahead, make sure we aren’t touching anything we shouldn’t. And suddenly I see something right ahead of me, something I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t been crawling, that tells me there’s been activity right there. I freeze.
“Just then, someone not twenty feet from us trips a wire. There’s a flash, and a scream, and he’s down and silent. Mason sort of jumps, and I grab his ankle, but his other foot goes right into the area ahead, where I know there’s something waiting. I just grit my teeth and hang on.
“He falls, but somehow he falls toward me and lands right next to me, but he’s sliding away at the same time. It’s a pit, and I know there’ll be a punji stick at the bottom, probably covered with shit to make sure whoever lands on it gets thoroughly infected. ‘Grab my clothes!’ I yell at him. He hangs on, and I’m pulling back with everything I’ve got. We scramble, clawing at the ground, and by the time I’ve pulled him up next to me the shelling has stopped.
“We’ll never know whether it was necessary to run for cover, ’cause we never found out how many VC were there. Too many guys had been killed or wounded to return an attack, so the radio guy called for a dustoff, which means Hueys would come in to take out the wounded. Mason and I found our way to the edge of the jungle with the other guys who made it, ready to provide some cover from the VC across the paddies if we needed to. We took cover by the side of the road while a couple of Hueys landed behind us. One of them was just lifting off when we heard this grinding, scraping noise. Mason and I wheeled around, not knowing what the hell might be happening, and we saw the rotor blades had come off one of the Hueys; the Jesus nut had let go.”
This was too much for Dad. He didn’t often interrupt Chris, but he asked, “What the hell’s a Jesus nut?”
“It holds the whole rotor mechanism to the top of the helicopter. If it comes off when you’re in flight, only Jesus can help you. But the copter had just started to lift off, so the guys inside weren’t hurt badly—except for the ones they were supposed to be carrying off, of course. Anyway, the blades had been moving, so they had some momentum, and when they went sliding off they were still going around. The blade piece rose into the air a little, drifted sideways and came down like a twirly toy. Then it hit this guy and took his head right off.”
We were all silent for several seconds. Then Chris said, “Thank God it was dark.” I knew what he meant; he wouldn’t have wanted to see that too clearly.
Chris turned in the seat so he was facing out the other way. I couldn’t see his face now. We sat there, maybe a minute, and then Chris got out of the car. As soon as his door slammed I started to open mine.
“Paul.” Dad’s voice was sharp. “Let your brother have a minute.”
Sometimes after one of these stories I’d go someplace by myself. Maybe my room, or if I didn’t want to be found, into a corner of the basement near the furnace, where it was warm enough to hang out for a while. In my mind I’d go over some of the scenes Chris had painted.
Chris had gotten an air rifle one Christmas, I think when he was ten, and although I never got one of my own he gave me his when he got tired of it. I found it and took it into the furnace corner, trying to imagine what it would be like to stalk through jungle, watching for trip wires and disturbed brush, anything that might give away the location of a mine or a booby trap or a pit with a punji stick in it. The air rifle became a machine gun.
Chris had told us that a machine gun isn’t a rifle. You don’t really take aim with it, and when you fire it’s a burst of five rounds at once in the general direction of where you think your target is. There’s this arc of light when you shoot, because every fifth round has magnesium on it, and it burns real bright so you can see where the rounds are going, even in daylight. The thing is, you want to pelt the area with as many bullets as possible.
In country, Chris said you often couldn’t really see the enemy, you just sort of knew where they probably were. And they weren’t likely to sit still while you fired at them. So this technique of raining bullets over a whole area, creating a sort of death zone where nothing could survive, was supposed to have more effect.
But Chris said you’d never know it was effective from the number of VC they kept seeing. It was like when you shot one, several more sprang up out of the ground. So one evening I sat there, pointing the old gun across to the other side of the basement, and I imagined what it would be like to fire hundreds of bullets in a few minutes at an enemy that kept growing in number. And every time I fired, there were more and more enemies swarming toward me.
I didn’t last very long. I started shaking, dropped the gun, and backed farther into the corner.
I guessed Chris must have lost quite a few friends by now, trying to hold this ground.
Mom made an executive decision about Chris’s time with us. Maybe she couldn’t stop him leaving when he was supposed to, but she could move Thanksgiving if she wanted to. He’d arrived home on Wednesday, and he had to leave on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. So Monday night was Thanksgiving in our house.
Mom declared that I was staying home from school, and she tried to get Dad to close the store, but he wouldn’t. He said too many people were contemplating giving pets at Christmas, and lots of them started shopping early for all the stuff that went with the animals, or buying books to figure out what pet they wanted to buy.
It was fun, actually. Mom let Chris and me do some of the cooking. I cut up the stuffing bread and the onions and things that go into stuffing, while Chris made the pie. He’d always been good at pies, and Mom could never figure it out. “I didn’t teach him much,” she’d say. “If I had, my crust would be as flaky as his!”
It felt a little like old times. I always liked this best, when it was just the three of us. When I was younger, I used to imagine that Chris was my dad, and he and Mom were married. They always got along so well, you know? Laughing and making silly jokes. Chris always laughed at Mom’s jokes, and she made more of them when Dad wasn’t there.
I hope this doesn’t sound like my folks didn’t get along. They were fine, for the most part. It’s just that when Dad wasn’t around and Chris was, Mom was almost like a girl. She was fun and silly and giggly, and Chris was somewhere between her best friend and her boyfriend. And when they teased me, which was their way of including me since I couldn’t always keep up with their joking, it felt good.
So we put dinner together, the three of us. We took our time, since Dad had said he wouldn’t be home any earlier than a usual work night. But he surprised us and showed up at three-thirty. He’d asked his assistant manager, Carol Burns, to come in on her day off so he could spend more time with Chris.
“Where’s this turkey dinner you promised me?” he bellowed, and he pretended he’d told us to expect him early when he knew he hadn’t, and he strutted around despite his limp, acting like he was annoyed and making silly faces. Mom put him to work polishing glasses and setting the table. He refused to iron the tablecloth, so Chris did that. Then Mom shooed us all into the living room while she finished things up.
“How about another one of your war stories, son?” he asked Chris, handing him a beer. I was thinking we’d probably heard enough of those, but obviously Dad wanted more.
Chris sat on the floor, his back to the sofa, and took a swallow. “You know, I have to go back there tomorrow. I’d rather not think about it. I’d much rather hear one of your stories. Something crazy somebody bought for their dog or their cat.”
Dad sat back and looked thoughtful for a minute, and then he nodded, taking a mouthful of beer. “Okay, okay. Here’s a silly one. You know how we have those books about how to raise everything from bearded dragons to pythons? Well, this one woman brought in her parrot and headed right for the books. Beautiful bird; bright green mostly—I think it was a Yellow-collared Macaw—nodding its