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 took the summit. The Huns made a few more passes, and we began an assault on the top. It took three hours, more guys died, maybe a dozen or so … a few others wounded. When we made it to the top, there were forty-seven people left in Delta Company.
“Half what you started with.”
“Yeah. When we finally got up there, there wasn’t a leaf left on a tree. It looked like something from a science fiction movie. A few blackened sticks poking out of the ground. That’s all that was left of jungle that was as thick as this until that day. And Charlie was gone too. We got up there, and we were by ourselves. There were eleven bodies from their side up there. I’m sure there was a lot more dead than that, and they’d taken the bodies with them when they left.”
“You and Tal … you were okay, you weren’t wounded?”
“We were … okay. I took shrapnel in the hand. I didn’t think it was bad, but it was bad enough that I spent the rest of my tour in Saigon. And Tal …”
He was staring off into space again, and his face was contorted. Like it had been before. I knew this was something I couldn’t ask him about. But he told me anyway.
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