Maeve McDonough
As he sat on the porch, he fixed his gaze on the dog frisking about on the lawn, avoiding the sight of his prosthetic leg. It had been years since the Viet Cong blew his real leg off—yet he still got phantom pains that stung like the angry red weaver ants from the Southeast Asian jungle.
He huffed as a warm gust of wind blew through his shirt. Winds like that usually meant rain.
He hated rain.
A nearby wind chime sent a tune drifting along the current of the breeze. As notes tumbled and somersaulted up and down, he suppressed flashbacks of bouncing betties and bombs catapulting men through the air.
Sometimes when it got quiet, he couldn’t suppress seeing such things in the back of his mind. Memories from the world of flak jackets and M-16s still haunted him—flashes of flaming villes and swaths of obliterated jungle. Shells and shrapnel. Guns and grenades. Disfigured dead men hidden in the leaves. Those lurid flashbacks never ceased to send tremors through his body and make his breathing shallow.
He didn’t sleep much anymore—years of no doz had made him an insomniac. If he did fall asleep and the night grew too quiet, devoid of singing crickets or rustling leaves, he’d wake up in a sweat, waiting for a gunshot. Sometimes neighbors would set off fireworks late at night. The sudden explosion of sound would hurtle him back to the place where mortar fire and napalm flamethrowers engulfed forests—the most horrible fireworks.
The dog trundled back up the steps, done with his business, and plopped down on the porch next to the old man. With a tilt of his head, he huffed, mimicking his master.
“You know, Bonzo, it rained for months at a time back in the other place,” the old man told his dog. He pondered the way he felt permanently wet after being drenched in repellent, sweat, and rain for many years.
The dog lay down, his ears perked up to hear the chime. He was a quiet dog, Bonzo. He’d been a fighting dog before rescuers had transferred him to the pound. The old man had taken him home because he reckoned that the dog had been through some horrible things, much like himself. For instance, Bonzo had a missing limb as well—only a stump where one of his front legs should have been. It could’ve had something to do with the fights. Punishments for dogs that lost those fights were, after all, insidious. As far as the old man knew, Bonzo’s handlers could have dragged the poor animal from a truck or hung him upside down in a closet.
Sometimes the old man wondered if such traumatizing experiences affected dogs the same way as people, if the things from Bonzo’s past afflicted him every day the way that things from the old man’s past did.
The darkening sky reminded the old man of Smitty, who used to say that the rain was the dead soldiers crying. Smitty said a lot of things.
Smitty would shake in his foxholes. He never should have been there. He wasn’t fit for war.
A lot of them weren’t fit for war.
The old man himself never planned on embarking to the Land of the Sun. As a matter of fact, he had his own plans—after graduating college he and Mary were supposed to be married. He and Mary were supposed to buy a house with a fireplace and sit together by the hearth after work. He was supposed to work a normal day job. He was supposed to be a father. He was
supposed to do fatherly things with his son, supposed to go fishing and play checkers. He was never supposed to hump guns and artillery through the jungle on a snipe hunt for Charlie Cong.
Mary had been pregnant with his son when he’d gotten his draft notice. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t just “not go.”
He couldn’t have said no, the old man thought. True, some guys objected. Those who called themselves conscientious objectors and simply said they weren’t going to fight in a war that they didn’t believe in. They went to jail instead. Other guys fled to Canada and hid across the border where Uncle Sam couldn’t tell them what to do.
But the old man knew that he couldn’t have lived with himself if he just ran away. He’d have been a coward. He’d hate himself for the rest of his life.
“Well, I’d hate myself for the rest of my life if I abandoned my son,” Mary had told him. And that still stung. But, the old man told himself again and again, she didn’t get it.
He didn’t even get it himself. He still didn’t understand what his “service” had accomplished. What he had lost his leg and half of his sanity for was still a mystery to him.
He often thought of what could’ve been if he were born into another family, one of politicians or social elites instead of store clerks. Maybe he could’ve gotten a deferment to stay in school. Maybe the wedding would’ve worked out and things would be different.
But the war changed him. He wasn’t the same man when he came home. A man couldn’t train to be a warrior, enveloped in violence and killing for years, and then come home and try to be a loving husband.
So there was no wedding. Mary left and married someone else. His son started hanging around with the wrong people and went down the wrong paths. He died young.
The old man often thought that things would have been different if he had been there for the kid. If he could have been a father figure to guide him along the right paths.
But the war ripped it all away.
Sometimes that feeling of a stolen life reminded the old man of the rice paddies and palm groves of the Southern Vietnamese villes. US troops were supposed to evacuate entire villes suspected of hiding VC guerillas. Their orders were to spare the Southern Vietnamese yet show no mercy on the NVA. Part of these missions was to destroy anything that could potentially help the communists—that included any food or shelter.
And the soldiers pretended those missions didn’t bother them, but it would twist something around inside of them. Seeing refugees collapse on the ground, watching helplessly with wide eyes as American troops shot their livestock and torched their huts.
The old man recalled how he used to look away from them. Yeah, he thought bitterly, the villagers were scared. He got it, it wasn’t fair. They were losing everything in that war. Everything was being taken from them.
Well, the old man thought, everything was taken from him too. Mary. His only son. His education. His future. His leg.
But he had a duty to serve his country. To be tough. This was war and he had to be a man.
Yet, seeing old Vietnamese mothers with their faces in their hands and orphaned refugee children bawling over their decimated homes violently struck a place in his heart.
After a while it made him, and the rest of his platoon, mad. It made them want to destroy things. Sometimes even it would make them want to kill.
After a while, all Vietnamese started to look the same. Viet Cong or villager, whatever. Every single foreign face began to mean the same thing to the Americans—the reason why they had their old lives ripped away and replaced with one that seemed to have no meaning.
Carlson and a few other guys took to using village livestock for target practice. Carlson was crazy—he started aiming for cattle’s heads. Blowing them off seemed to satisfy him. Made him feel like he had power over something.
The old man would grind his teeth and bury his resentment deep within. He didn’t bother fooling himself into thinking he held any power over anything. Repellent did not stop mosquitos. Garters did not stop leeches. Staying still did not make him invisible. Drugs did not make the pain go away.
Connolly didn’t get that. He became a wreck and sold his soul to smack. The only way he kept himself going was by using enough heroin to send him into a beautiful oblivion, away from the bugs and the blood and the bodies. Poor Connolly, the old man thought, because Connolly never seemed to understand it; no matter how much smack he used in Nam, he’d always have to leave his oblivion. He would never be able to stay in his inviolate haven forever—he’d always have to step back into hell.
Going home should’ve been close to freedom. But it didn’t feel that way.
While the old man was away, word had gotten out on the home front that the Americans were murdering the civilians in those Southern villes. When the old man finally made it home, with a stump where his leg used to be, he was spat on and called a baby killer.
“I never killed no babies,” the old man would often vent to his dog. No one in his platoon did. Sometimes Carlson would say he wanted to murder every person in Vietnam, every woman and child. But Carlson was crazy. He said things, like Smitty.
Sometimes the old man thought it was funny, how his country had, essentially, shoved a gun into his hands and shipped him off to Vietnam to kill people, only to hate him forever after he did that exact thing. He would actually start laughing about it sometimes.
Most of the time, however, he would lament how far gone he was since those days. He wished he could enjoy things like wind chimes and fireworks. But he could not.
“I guess we’ll go in, then,” he said to Bonzo as a few drops of rain splattered on the porch. Yet he didn’t move. His thoughts spiraled to how once the rain started, it would keep going for five months, and he and the boys would have to wade through a sea of mud and try not to drown, and how once they got to higher ground, they’d have to crawl on their hands and knees through the slosh, caked with mud…
A nudge on his good leg brought his eyes back into focus. Bonzo had sat up and placed his paw on the old man’s lap.
“I know, buddy,” the old man said. “It’s over.”
It was often that he tried to assure himself that it was over. But he knew, deep down, that it would never really be over.