pretty good with AK-47’s at the same time. From over there was the worst.” He pointed to the right. The jungle was thickest there. Maybe it was back then too. “That’s where I saw that first guy I shot at.”
My butt was sore, and my back was getting stiff, so I shifted my weight. Tried to get more comfortable.
“Go ahead, dig right there, at the bottom of your foxhole.”
“What for?”
“Guys sometimes buried stuff there. Or just left it in the foxhole when they moved out. Or got killed.”
“I don’t know if I want to.”
“It’s okay,” he nodded. “Go ahead.”
I stood up and unfolded the shovel. “Where should I dig?”
“Anywhere. In the bottom of the hole.”
I dug. It wasn’t easy. There was grass and roots from the trees and other stuff growing around there. I didn’t really think I’d find anything. And at first I didn’t. But then there was something. I didn’t know what it was; it looked like part of a little tin can or something. There were words on the side, but I couldn’t make them out. I reached down, lifted it out of the hole … handed it to the old man.
He looked at it, then looked up at me, sort of smiling. “C rations. What we ate when we were in the field came in these little tins. This one was ham and lima beans, the worst shit they ever put in C rations. Every guy hated it. We called it ham and chokers. There were worse names too, but ham and chokers says it real well.”
He tossed the tin back to me. “Got yourself a souvenir.”
A souvenir. Something to make me remember a summer I wanted to forget. I handed the tin and the shovel back to him. He put them both in the backpack.
I sat back down in the foxhole. “Listen, I’m not pissed off or anything, but I’m still wondering why you brought me here.”
He did up the backpack, pulled it behind his head, lay back on it. “Sometimes the most important thing that happens in your life isn’t a good thing. This is the most important thing that ever happened to me. I wish I could say it was your mom. Or you. But it was this. I want you to know me. To know me you have to know this.”
“I don’t get why you were in that war. You … we’re … Canadian.”
“There were other Canadians who fought in Vietnam.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
The corners of the old man’s mouth turned up just a little. “The truth? I didn’t have anything else to do. My baseball career was over. I’d had a couple of jobs, hated them … I wanted to do something, have an adventure, care about something.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Don’t try to understand it, Nate. I don’t totally myself. I remember reading all this stuff about how if this place became communist, then all these other countries would too. They called it the domino effect. Back then communism, that was a bad word. I guess it still is, but then it seemed like a big deal to stop them from taking over this part of the world. And I thought, ‘yeah, that’s something I can do. That’s the thing I can care about.’”
He waited for a while before he said, “I had it completely wrong.”
“Can I ask you something?”
He smiled a bit bigger this time. “You already asked me some things. Quite a few things.”
“I know. One more.”
He nodded.
“In the war museum there were all these photos. A place called My Lai.”
His eyes narrowed when I said the name. He nodded.
I wasn’t sure how to say what I wanted to say. Without making him mad. “You ever … you know … ”
“Was I ever involved in something like My Lai? Is that what you want to know?”
I looked down at the ground.
“The answer is no. Nothing like that. My Lai happened after my tour was over, but it made all of us sick. All of us who had tried to do our jobs and knew the whole time that so many people back home hated what we were doing and then those guys go nuts and massacre all those people, those kids … babies … ”
“Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“Nate, I can’t sit here and say I didn’t do some things I wish I hadn’t done. War brings out the worst … and maybe sometimes the best in people. It wasn’t like I thought it would be — them and us, good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats. There was a lot of bad shit happened on both sides.”
He paused, reached for the canteen but didn’t take a drink. “That doesn’t make My Lai right. I hate that those guys were on our side. I’m just saying there was stuff that happened that made me wish I’d never come here.”
I didn’t answer at first. He drank, then handed me the canteen, and I took a long drink. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Even though I’m here I’m not sure I understand very much about what happened in that war. I mean you want me to know this so I can know you, know who you are. But I can’t say if that’s happening.”
“I get that, Nate. I really do. I don’t know that I’ve figured out a lot of it myself. ”
“How did it end?”
“The war? We lost, plain and simple. America lost the stomach to keep fighting when most Americans didn’t know what it was they were fighting for.”
“I meant here.” I looked around us. “Hill 453. How did it end?”
It was a long time before he answered, so long that I thought we’d gone back to me asking about stuff and him not telling me. But that wasn’t it. I watched, and his face twitched a couple of times. He was looking away, into the trees. I figured he was seeing it again. But this time he seemed in control.
Finally, he took a deep breath, let it out slow, looked back at me. “We hung on until help got to us,” he said. “That’s the short answer. They could have overrun us anytime they wanted to. But they didn’t. I don’t know why. I’ll never know why.
“There was a thunderstorm that night. Real light show. They didn’t let up shelling, and it was the damndest thing, not being able to tell the difference between the thunder and lightning and incoming shells. Then, when the thunderstorm stopped, the shelling stopped. It was like it was all part of their battle plan.
“In the morning, the sky cleared, and they probably figured help would be coming. So they really let us have it. An hour or more … it was the … the worst yet. A lot of people died right around here that morning. We were sure we’d be overrun, and that it would happen any minute. It’s funny but I wasn’t as scared anymore. I guess once you’ve figured out that these people are going to kill you, you just want to make them pay for the privilege.
“We called again for close air support and this time a couple of Huns, F-100s, came in, blew the shit of the place.
“The Hueys were able get in for dustoffs, and we got the wounded out. A company of marines was part of the same mission we were on — Operation Blue Water. They started out as soon the word got out that we’d been ambushed. They arrived about mid-morning. Army hates being rescued by marines, but I was just fine with it.”
“So that was it.”
The old man shook his head. “No, that wasn’t it. To show you how screwed up that war was, after all that we’d taken in that twenty-four hours, we got orders to move out. Take the summit; that was our orders, with the marines in reserve. We had sixty, maybe sixty-five guys left, and we were told to take the summit of 453.”
“What did you do?”
“We