American Blood: A Novel

American Blood

© 1987 by John Treadwell Nichols

All rights reserved.

University of New Mexico Press edition published 2014 by arrangement with the author.

Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Nichols, John Treadwell, 1940–

American blood : a novel / John Nichols. — First UNM Press Edition.

pages cm

Originally published: New York : Henry Holt Company, April 1987.

ISBN 978-0-8263-5468-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5469-3 (electronic)

I. Title.

PS3564.I274A8 2014

813’.54—dc23

2013039767

I’m sure to go to heaven, boys,

Because I’ve done my time in hell.

1. Nam

No doubt, some men and women truly believe in the beautiful madness of war. Deep down they have a lust for all that melodramatic insanity. Richard Nixon, William Westmoreland, Curtis LeMay, Ronald Reagan, Douglas MacArthur—don’t you ever believe their pious homilies about waging war so the world can live in peace, be safe for democracy. It all has to be the biggest crock ever invented. Gerald Ford once said, All wars are the glory and the agony of the young.

Well, I’m young, or I was once when I went to war, but I sure never tipped to the glory of my temporary occupation as foot soldier, on the line, killing all those commies for Mommy, for Christ, for the good old USA. No, from my humbler perspective it always seemed like an old man’s game, and I can actually picture them now, centuries, millenniums of paunchy old geezers, bespangled in gold epaulets and campaign ribbons and medallions, down on their callused knees, and, with unspeakable urgency, performing fellatio on the great god of carnage, Mars, until finally their idol comes, filling their mouths with a mixture of blood, maggots, and decaying brains—war jism is what I call it.

War jism.

Love it or leave it, Gerald Ford.

We were just humping along (singing a song) when I saw it. Talk about pretty—la-di-da. I thought it was a cluster of bright blue wildflowers. In fact, right about then that’s what I needed it to be. So I veered to pluck a blossom; me, the incurable romantic of our platoon. I planned to stick a flower in the webbing of my headgear, show those hotshot COs leading us into stupid battle a bit of the old Peace-Love-Groovy.

The blue colors reflecting hot sunlight shivered, an iridescent sheen that seemed almost to hum. In fact, the entire bouquet quivered as my exhausted shadow touched it. And that’s when the bunch exploded. I didn’t even have time to react. Booby trap! flared in my brain as big flakes of blueness sailed past me like fragments of shrapnel. Fucking VC, dirty little buggers, never missed a trick. And up went my hands as I toppled backward, squealing like a stuck dink.

No, actually, they don’t squeal much, stoic little bastards, by and large. It’s us who squeal; us with our big, pink bellies when the metal does its dirty business, and the lights start going out.

There must have been a hundred fancy Asian butterflies feeding on the bloated corpse of that child. Eyes puffed shut, tongue tip pink between swollen lips, huge belly, tiny penis stiff and scratched raw by the feet of flies, fat fetid legs akimbo, rotten crotched in surrender.

By the time I raised back up on one knee all the lovely bugs had relanded, resumed their feasting. And I? I followed a road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

So begins our story about the glory and the agony of the young.

Over there, in country, I often mistook objects like that dead child for something else. Never could understand exactly what was real, what imagined. A common enough plight for everybody: for your basic grunt, your basic captain, your basic general, your basic President of the United States. Everybody, including yours truly, Michael Smith, Michael P. Smith—P. for prurient, P. for paralyzed, P. for Paul, if you must know the truth—invented the people, the landscapes, the logic of our pillaging. After all, everyone needs a reason to perish. Can’t just say, Oops, I fell into hell—lawdy, lawdy. No, there has to be high purpose, moral goals for creating a landscape infinitely littered by offal. God forbid any American should expire in vain. I used to concentrate on that, marching through the dust, humping the rice paddies, over and over again the refrain: In vain, in vain, in vain. Not me, no sirree bob, huhuh. I was terrified of dying in vain.

Actually, I was simply terrified of dying.

So I drifted through it; we all did, all tried to stay alive, and killed anything that interfered, and I never much felt like I was awake over there. I was just a groggy member of a somnambulist army, spreading dire consequences wherever it tramped. "Ram, bam, thank you, Nam’—belly open, entrails bulging. Our motto: When we grease ’em, they stay greased.

And then I came back to the world and the danger was all over. And I woke up. And all of a sudden the war was totally real. Things focused, they took on purpose, they had moral consequences. My conscience said, Howdy, Michael, whatcha been doin’ all this time, bro’?

And then the proverbial excrement hit the proverbial fan.

I remember this. We were in a hamlet; it started to rain. Barrels of rain, dump trucks of rain, reservoirs of hot rain. Shucks, now we can’t torch the hooches! Like almost you feel underwater; you expect bubbles coming out their noses, rising up from people, chickens, dogs, cattle trying to breathe. Stow them Zippos, boys. They’re gonna drown of their own accords! We all sought shelter. But this one Vietnamese kid wouldn’t get out of the downpour. Maybe because there was a Yankee grunt in the doorway of almost every hooch. Maybe he was retarded. Maybe he was confused. Maybe he was part duck. He was five or six years old, scrawny like they all were, and he just stood in the middle of the muddy plaza. Wearing some Uncle Ho sandals, tattered beige shorts, that’s all. Arms and legs knobby and delicate, covered with sores. Not very many fat people over there in Nam, were there? Only in Saigon. They ate garbage like we eat caviar, and thanked their lucky stars profusely for any leavings in a sordid time.

This guy next to me, name of Carp, Thomas Carp—he started hollering: Hey, get out of the rain, you stupid dink! You’ll catch pneumonia! Mr. Compassionate. Oh, maybe he was concerned, who knows how God programs the human brain? Not me. Not Private (not even Private First Class) Michael P. Smith. Get out of the rain, you stupid little gook! Carp hollered, but the kid didn’t move. After all, there was a gringo man—a nigger, a honkie, a spic—in every doorway. Or maybe—surprise! surprise!—the kid didn’t understand English.

What are you, an idiot? Carp shook his gun at the kid, then turned to me. These people got shit for brains, they’re fuckin’ morons!

And what did we do to morons over in the Nam? Simple: waste the retards. So Carp swung around, aimed his 16, and shot the kid, just once—pop!—smack-dab in the old breadbasket. No great histrionics followed. Maybe the bullet zipped right through; it didn’t knock him over. Little Huan or Duc or Chang just plopped down into a sitting position and sat there holding his belly, staring at us. The rain pounded, splashing in puddles, blasting up gooey droplets of mud all over the square. Looked like the earth, in filthy squirts, was jumping up all over the place. Made a reedy battering sound against the thatch of all the hooches. Clattered like marbles in a quaking jar off the tin roof of their cinder-block community center. And there were gooks—’scuse me, Vietnamese human beings—huddled around, too, sheltering under whatever. Wrinkled papasans and mamasans, their arms folded, glaring out at the rain with those eyes they assumed whenever we showed up. Holy Moses, you were never dry over in the Nam. Surprised me sometimes those Asiatics didn’t have moss and big green dripping bunches of weedy slop dangling off them like creatures from a black lagoon. We certainly always carried a rot on us, in all the crevices, between our toes, under our balls. Endless itching in Nam—Jesus. I had sores all over my body, big red welts from the bugs and a bunghole that throbbed all day, every day. The country inspired endless diarrhea; my pants were always caked from dribbling shit. But at least some of the bugs stopped for a minute during the daily monsoons. Blessed relief.

Kids, too, in apprehensive bunches, lounged around the square gawking into the rain at the shot boy contemplating his navel. But nobody made a move. Any slant stirred now they knew they might get wasted. No bonfires today, and our outfit was feeling a trifle petulant. So the dinks hung fire and peered at the gut-shot victim, who barely even whimpered. Nearby lay a crumpled bicycle, gleaming.

The guy who popped him, Carp, commenced bitching: Look at that asshole! Look at that stupid asshole! He can’t even die! Then he addressed the kid personally: "Die, you stupid schmuck! Go ahead, die! And to us: See? These people are crazy, they don’t even know how to die!"

No, that little gook wouldn’t croak. Shoot him again, somebody grumbled. But Carp would have none of that. Mad he might be, but not a madman. I can’t. What do you think I am, an animal? He’s only a kid.

Wait a minute, he’ll drown, another guy joked. We laughed. Lot of humor over there in country. Regular barrel of monkeys providing the fun that levered our days.

Rain, rain, rain … and nothing happened. Until a monster pig rounded a corner and minced into the plaza snuffling at the muck, moving forward, swinging its head from side to side emitting funny salacious grunting noises. It walked right up to Ho Duc Dodo and stopped. Confronted the gut-shot little bugger, fat snout twitching, sniffing curiously. Then poked its head forward, bumped into flesh, started slurping at the belly wound. The kid’s hands fluttered against the big snout. The pig snorted, irritated, tossed its head a little shaking off the hands. Weakening, the hands flapped against the dirt-blotched ears—no silk purses in the offing here. Then we could see the belly where a glistening bubble of intestine had broken through the skin. The pig weighed maybe two hundred pounds. And in an almost delicate, prissy manner it began eating the gut bubble. Nibbled tentatively at first, the boy’s hands laying loosely against the big head sort of laxly holding it like you would a basketball, maybe, calculating a free throw. All relaxed and very passive.

Pretty soon the porker got into it, gave a yank, essayed a couple of eager munches. Good stuff, warm guts. Yanked again, chewing. The kid’s eyes stayed trained directly at Carp.

For Pete’s sake, shoot ’em both, a queasy grunt grumbled. But no way, José—not now. All of us, dinks and soldiers alike, were fascinated. I mean, it’s not every day you see a big fat animal devour a human being alive. And the hog got into it, now, very deliberate, jerking its head from time to time releasing another few inches of intestinal goodies.

Finally the beast lurched backward, and, attempting to liberate a particularly choice morsel, it jerked little Ho Chi Minh over into a puddle. Then straddled the boy like it was maybe gonna fuck him and kept eagerly noshing up the guts with a flurry of rips and snuffles. Still alive, our comic commie relief, gazing at the sky now, child eyes drowning in water. Arms danced up a final time and flopped against the tough hide, the right leg jerked a bit; the left foot scooted out. Pig lifted one hoof and pawed at the abdominal cavity, pinning down the body while it tugged for the rest of the glop: entrails, spleen, liver, kidneys, stomach, lungs—yum, yum, pig candy.

Shoot the pig, a dismayed American growled. But nobody could. As I said, not every day do you get front-row tickets for a spectacle like this. We were mesmerized. Rain splashed off the pig like gallons of liquid bullets; rain jumped in all the puddles; a lake spread across the plaza.

That pig kept on for a while, methodical, chewing carefully, making sure it devoured everything. Finally nosed in and chomped the heart, savored the delicacy, then shook its gruff head in satisfaction, glanced once around and gulped it down. Still beating, that heart? Who knows? Sometimes, I swear, given the dumb courage of those feisty relics from the Stone Age up against our fully automated slaughtering machine—sometimes I swear their hearts just never stopped beating. Took such a licking, but kept on ticking. Like the country, you couldn’t really snuff the people. Reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart. You walked around, you could hear the hearts of all the dead gooks we iced and buried beating on underneath your hoots. Occasionally their hearts were like land mines, they exploded, took off your legs at the knees—stump city. You just couldn’t kill them dead enough. Straggling through the jungles you could hear the hearts of their dead beating all over the place, beneath the vines, hidden in elephant grass. A thousand years of their history lay underfoot. You’d walk through the paddies, see bubbles rising where their dead had fallen, their hearts breathing underwater. Like vampires, the gooks—even a silver stake through their chests didn’t quiet them. Their earth was composed of all their dead, their massacred communities, their chopped and buggered martyrs, always beating, pumping blood through veins of agony throughout their festering earth. How you gonna defeat a people fighting to defend a land that contains centuries of their own hallowed dead? Maybe if we’d buried our corpses in their earth we would have kicked more ass. Oh yeah, it gave me the royal creeps.

I think, despite the noisy battering-ram deluge, I heard the kid give a mournful squeak when the pig tore out his heart. Then the body lay still. The pig nosed around in the cavity, tonguing up assorted odds and ends. Then stopped at last, glanced up licking its chops and slowly turned a circle, squinting disinterestedly at all us captivated onlookers. Maybe it got a whiff of danger then, I don’t know. Do pigs differentiate between their normal slops and a human being? I figure no: shit is just shit to a shiteater. And hey, who among us really cared? Pigs, buzzards, dogs, Cholon chinks—everybody grew plump on carrion in Nam. So without further ado this hog gave a twitch, a perky flick of its heels, and trotted off, daintily splashing through puddles leaving that empty body behind.

The rain pelted and nobody moved, nobody spoke. I was thinking: another VC for the body count. Any dead gook was a VC we could count. Any dead water buffalo was a VC we could count. Any dead dog, pig, chicken, or snake was a VC we could count. You died in Nam, if you were slant eyed you automatically became a VC we could count. By conservative estimates we counted a million and a half VC over there. And it cost us ten million bucks for every number.

And if you could personally prove you had killed enough VC, you earned some in-country R and R. A day off at the beaches, and all the infected zip quiff you could stomach. I recall two grunts fighting over an arm: who had the right to turn it in? I saw it first! shouted the big guy. Fuck you, I saw it first, said the little guy. They had a tug-of-war with that arm, both of them noodled out, gone bonkers, absolutely crazy. They wanted that three-day leave. Finally, the big lummox took out a .45 and greased the little rooster—K-wham!—in the middle of his chest. Popped his heart like a balloon. And got his R and R.

Naturally, Carp got to claim this one—the Pig Boy. Always afterward we’d say, Remember the Pig Boy? Har de har har. Later, after the rain let up, Carp actually cut off an ear just to prove it—a democracy needs living proof, you know. In God we trust, all others pay cash. And the Army stores all those ears in a big vault (in the middle of Beverly Hills). Collateral, they say; drawing interest from the big bank in hell.

The ear got Carp three days in Da Nang’s Dogpatch, world’s most festering brothel, Cunt County, Indochina. Carp came out of it high on smack, and without a case of clap—miracle of miracles! Oh that Pig Boy, he crowed to us. That’s one dink to whom I owe a lot.

To whom. Most educated country in the world, our USA. Shoved grammar down their heathen throats in Nam, you bet we did—shoved it down in royal spades.

The glory and the agony of the young.

It never stopped, of course. In later years the pundits all bewailed the fact that in Nam Death Had Become an End in Itself.

For those of us poor devils on the ground, genocide sure had an intimate face. Save their ass—? My ass. By the time I arrived in country our single and singular mission in life was to dismember an entire race of people, turning their pathetic country into a bloody soup of human bone, gristle, tissue, feces. In the end we came out Number 2, but nobody can chide us for not trying harder.

Boys became men over there, men became dead, zipped up in green vinyl Glad bags, flown home first class, buried with a twenty-one-gun salute. Pious homilies; patriotic claptrap; saccharine bullshit. Died in the service of murder and mayhem is all it ever amounted to far as I could see. Honor guard folded up the flag, worms went to work—Birdy num-num.

We stumbled through it in a kind of killing trance. No rhyme, no reason, no front. Went somewhere, got killed, and killed a lot of the diminutive beaners in exchange. Took a hill, suffered great casualties, gave great casualties and departed next day, never to return. The slicks came and wafted us home to steak and ice cream hours after major battles. The dust-offs arrived and whisked away those of us missing certain pieces of ourselves. We lined up the enemy bodies and snapped pictures with our Instamatics. Weren’t supposed to, but we did it anyway. Then we cut off ears, made necklaces, hung them from the aerials of Amtracs. Pissed on the bodies, defecated in their mouths, stuck sticks up their rectums, cut off testicles, cut off heads, stuffed severed privates into the mouths of dead women. Seemed our basic purpose was to mutilate people and landscape as thoroughly and as horribly as possible using the most advanced technology ever available to any civilization. Civilization—that word has a tart flavor on my tongue. Civilization, indeed. Jews—excuse me, kikes, Hebes, mockies, yids—in the German holocaust suffered no worse than did the Vietnamese.

Agent Orange, white phosphorus, napalm, B-52s, M-60s, Chinooks, Hueys, FACs, Puff the Magic Dragons, F-104s, F-111s, M-79 grenade launchers, radios, concertina wire, Claymore mines, Starlight Scopes, People Sniffers, Bouncing Bettys, butterfly bombs, miniguns, C-4 explosives, M-16s, trip flares, 155 howitzers, Spookys, Gatling guns, K-bar knives, fixed bayonets, .45 automatics, captured AK-47s, water tortures, Bell Telephone Hour electrocutions, assassinations, ambushes, hosings, killings, mutilating masturbating death. We treated the entire country like a Free-Fire Zone. A sniper took a single potshot at us, we retaliated with the wrath of God. Saturated their land with unspeakable suffering; committed terracide against their country; committed terracide against their souls. Tried to rub ’em out, kill ’em all. Waste every last dink and begin again with Americans. Put all the good gooks in boats, take ’em out to sea, then annihilate everybody left in the country … then sink the boats. Never failed to get a laugh, that one.

When I first arrived in country I remember thinking, This ain’t half bad. This is a beautiful place. Then I noticed something wrong. Couldn’t land a finger on it at first. Began like one of those cartoon games in the newspapers—What’s wrong with this picture? Find the fifteen hidden mistakes. Well, I found them all right. There existed so many cripples in Nam. All these chipper zits prancing around missing limbs, or parts of limbs, or an ear, or maybe a couple fingers, a toe, a foot … and it wasn’t just ex-soldiers, or farmers—people you might expect. It was lovely young girls, also, and kids of all ages, on crutches, waddling about on stumps begging with open hands that contained no fingers.

Droves of exquisite deformed human beings.

So many of them that at first they simply blended in, seemed a natural part of the landscape, hard to notice.

But once you snapped on it, gee willikers; the country was a friggin’ freak show.

They all should have walked around displaying red, white, and blue stamps on their stumps: MADE IN AMERICA.

Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey: a nation modeled after The Elephant Man.

The VC were like hummingbirds, small and swift and often invisible. By contrast we were huge and clumsy, noisy and awkward, fat and big, always overexposed. Our firepower killed them. Torched the very atmosphere so they couldn’t breathe. Poured gases, flames, liquid explosives into their tunnels underground. Burned the earth, leveled the towns, herbicided the forests, poisoned the rice paddies, and bulldozed anything that remained. We laid down so much withering heat that finally the hummingbirds couldn’t dart through it. Opened up with M-16s and M-60s and M-79s and 155s and B-52s dropping 750-pounders, and kicked ass on those hummingbirds, you bet. And when it was all over, when the villes were burned and all the animals lay dead and all the leaves had curled up and all the splintered greasy forests smoked fretfully … when it was all over and we were stupidly mingling around gawking at the carnage … there it would be again, the fluttery distant buzz of another hummingbird, tiny energetic ghosts flitting through the jungle setting their teeny-weeny traps to blow off our arms and jaws, our testicles and kneecaps, digging their punji pits so we could be impaled on razor-sharp slivers of bamboo smeared in human excrement.

What you have to be over here, said a buddy of mine named Rothstein, "is you have to be like a fucking golem. No, not like, you have to be a fucking golem."

What’s a golem? asked Michael P. Smith, all-American WASP, Happy Honkie, and otherwise culturally deprived human being.

It’s a Yiddish monster that eats human turds for breakfast and butt-fucks dinks until they’re dead, he replied.

Is it covered by hair?

Hard to tell because it’s always so drenched in blood.

Well, who knows why?—time, place, verbal inflection—but that captured my imagination. And ever afterward I saw myself as Rothstein’s version of a golem: hairy, bloody, butt-fucking dinks, mouth full of shit, thirty feet tall, and never leaving the home base without my American Express card—an M-16 shaped like Karl Malden’s nose.

You’d think after a while the deaths would merge into each other: the edges of all the bloody details would get blurry … but they didn’t. I guard a hundred individual memories of atrocity, all bright and polished like photographs in a truly professional scrapbook. And every one seems indignantly unique.

For example, one time we captured four of them up near Nha Trang on the beach. A few large metal Conex boxes lay around outside our camp and somebody had the brilliant idea to jail the prisoners inside. So we locked them in the boxes without food and water for two days. By noon of the second day the temperature at sand-dune level was a hundred and twenty degrees. When finally we opened the Conexes to peep inside, the corpses were already bloated up to twice their natural size. The stench almost knocked us out. We splashed three bags of lime over them and shut the lids again.

During that same operation we came across dink prisoners who had been handled by other troops working in our area of operations—a man and a woman hanging in a tree. The woman hung by her long hair from a branch, hands tied behind her back, burned all over by cigarette butts. They must have jammed some C-4 plastic into her vagina and detonated it, no doubt while she still breathed. The legs were erased at the hip; her innards had dropped into a pile on the ground. As an afterthought a sharpened bamboo stick had been implanted through her midriff and a paper South Vietnamese flag tied to one end.

The man had a crowbar punched through his head, in one ear, out the other, a Chieu Hoi pass was shish-kebabbed onto one end. Rope on either side of the crowbar extended up to a tree branch. No ears, no privates. The privates were located in his mouth. The penis head poked out between clenched teeth like a purple tongue. One hand was chopped off.

Tom Carp took a picture, clicked his Instamatic. He had a penchant for that sort of scene. Some other guys took photos also. I just left it alone—it was boring, I thought. You got burned out after a while on that sort of candid pic.

We left them dangling in the trees. Unburied Vietnamese are called wandering souls, they never get any rest. Apparently, it’s a terrible thing for a gook to be buried when their body is not whole. That’s why, much of the time, we cut off a hand, a foot, a head—and hid them. Just another way to show we meant business, to demoralize them, to capture their hearts and minds, keep ’em honest.

So often death took them by surprise. We rarely mingled around asking questions and assessing the situation before we cut loose. By the time I arrived in country everybody was much too paranoid for that. Law of the land said: shoot first, ask questions afterward. Only good Indian (substitute gook) was a dead Indian (substitute gook again).

One day on patrol we turned a corner and surprised an old man squatting in midtrail taking a shit. It disgusted us the way gooks defecated outdoors, in public, beside roads, in the fields, any old place. Blasé as you please. So here was a wrinkled old prune sporting a few tattered wisps of hair on his chin taking a dump in the middle of our trail. He looked up, startled. Then smiled. They always smiled at us, even if they wanted to off us. Hi, guys, my name is Wang, and I’m your host for the evening. He had a silly, toothless grin; wasn’t even embarrassed. But the smile never really charged up, because our lead man—your friend and mine, Thomas Carp—instinctively shot him.

Just turned the corner, met the unexpected geezer taking a crap, and greased him.

Our reaction? We all laughed. It was the funniest thing. That papasan had looked so foolish squatting there, a turd half out of his ass, when suddenly a great big American with a great big gun just blew him away—bang! splat! payday! The whole patrol cracked up. Days later, even, guys would break into giggles. Stop in their tracks, slap their thighs, point a finger at each other and say, Bang, you’re dead! Right in the middle of a shit!

Oh, we hooted and guffawed. Did you catch the look on the face of that old dink just before he bought the farm?

Belly laughter, yes indeed. Fellows like us would latch on to anything for a chortle over in Nam. I certainly do wish Bob McNamara and Bob Hope could have been there at such times to share the jokes, enlarge their repertoires, take it back home to the U.S. public.

Every now and then something so weird happened that it fairly sucked my breath away. Take this little burg near Phu Bai. We had just been flown into the area and were pretty nervous, because in the past couple weeks there’d been several pitched battles between us and the NVA, North Vietnamese regulars. A bunch of them had been killed, but so had a lot of us. Hence we had moved into the ville and very cautiously felt it out. The peasants seemed cooperative, but they were known to support the enemy. So we ignited it. Herded everybody away to the outskirts, and methodically burned down every hooch in town.

Smack-dab in the middle of the operation we heard an incredible noise overhead. Turned out to be a giant Tarhe Sky Crane chopper, looks like a praying mantis or a humongous dragonfly. It rattled directly above the burning village. Underneath it bulged a huge cargo net plumb full of goodies. Hard to decipher from the ground what they were: looked like big globs of bubble gum or large chunks of pink cottage cheese.

Then they punched a release button and the net unfurled, dumping the load straight at us. At first, the ordnance just hung together; then it began to separate, becoming distinctly shaped like individual naked human beings. And that’s what it was: a ton of naked bodies falling at us. Only how could that be? I mean Christ on a crutch, I’d witnessed some bizarre antics in Nam, but nothing like this. All of us reacted similarly: stood transfixed, gawking, as dead men tumbled toward us. I thought, Holy cow, some joke. Perhaps a kind of propaganda operation. Store mannequins, maybe with rubber knives stuck in their bellies, the latest scare tactic from PSYOP.

But when they thudded to earth, we understood they were honest to God Vietnamese bodies. They crashed through burning rooftops, splintered a cart, clapped against the 50-mm machine gun on our APC, slammed to earth with crunching blunt thumps, plummeted through treetops tearing out leaves and branches, splashed into puddles left over from yesterday’s downpour.

Soon as the first one hit we started dancing. Bodies landed all over the place—thump! thump! thump! I was astonished and could barely move. If luck had been against me I would have been annihilated by a deceased dink dropped from heaven. And in fact one grunt was actually clobbered—a fellow named Charles Detwiler took a body directly on the noggin, snapped his neck, dead instantly.

Turns out they were NVA soldiers killed in an operation nine clicks away in a hamlet called Do Jan. They took too many of our side with them so somebody concocted this scheme, called for the Sky Crane, carried it out. I doubt a sense of humor spirited the play; more like a muddled rage. Idea was, of course, to teach the gooks in this ville a lesson.

So we were bombarded