“Hey, dad. Looks like you’re on a break from… everyone! Mind if I sit with you?” Morton smiled up from the bed. He was struggling with pain that day. Pain made him quiet. Scott had picked a natural lull between various family members. He sat down on the edge of his father’s bed and began to tonalise at 285Hz. Despite the doctor’s assessment, Morton was not as gaunt as one would have expected for someone in the final stages of terminal cancer. The assessments were relative and skewed by confirmation bias. Once they had diagnosed him, their views on options and their prognosis closed down and entered a pattern. This had a powerful effect on patients’ mentalities and shortened life if left unchecked. Scott had warned family about the effect and tried to empower them against it by example and the introduction of alternative perspectives of health and treatment. He was careful not to push too hard. People had to come along at their own pace, if they came at all. James was a prime example of technical, rational, scientific thinking, but he had built a whole world inside that mindframe in order to escape his maze using the same thought process. Had Scott intervened, James’ motivation and drive would have changed, to the possible net loss of everyone. Now he had found something to share after years of searching in his darkness.
After a few minutes of the internalised frequency, Scott began to hum the tone out loud. Morton would choose to engage or not, as he pleased. A few more minutes passed. Morton reached out his hand for Scott to take and bonded in the tone. Once Morton’s tonal exhalations extended and remained consistent, Scott switched to 528Hz. Eventually, Morton switched to 528Hz and together they filled their space with their amplification. More time passed in that wave with Morton still and peaceful. A spasm in his hand suggested a spike of pain, which was Scott’s cue to switch back to 285Hz. They cycled like this for half an hour, until Morton’s pain seemed to subside and his frame and grip lost their rigidity. Scott switched to 852Hz and waited.
“James…” Morton’s eyes were closed and he spoke from an edge of memory and thought. “he might be on the cusp. I’d like to see that. Tragedy is a funny thing, isn’t it? And so is pain.”
Tell me what you’re thinking, Scott emoted. He shifted and lay down on his side, facing Morton, connected by grip and frequency and frame.
We were just a mismatch of personalities and neither of us recognised that. We didn’t have the skills or self-awareness. He was a kid, I was… just me. When we got to the end of… our trains of thought, our feelings, our… evaluations, we generally ended up agreeing with each other. It’s how we got there that differed. Personality and perspective clashes inside family, doesn’t it? In other walks of life you manage differently - avoid those who seem different, or change behaviours at work to accommodate and manage and actually capitalise on the differences. But in family…
We were clashing in the car. I can barely remember the details, more the sentiments and feelings. Something about political events, something about the difference between his youthful idealistic principles judging those events, some difference with my more cynical or realistic perspective.
I know I didn’t screw up. It was a four-way stop. Nothing from the right. I nearly ground to a full stop… automatic pilot, you know… it was clear my way. My boy was angry at this point, some rant, all encompassing, too big and too fast to really be a talk. It was overwhelming. He has that force inside, that’s why he’s fought like he has. In the car it was a massive distraction, him ranting. I went through the stop. The truck - I didn’t know it was a truck - just changed us in an instant…
…I can find glimpses of violence and motion and imaginings of what it was like. I know that James is in there and the pain of watching him like that is too great.
I remember coming to. I was totally mixed up. I thought I was in ‘Nam but none of our surroundings made sense. I didn’t know who James was. I literally didn’t recognise him. I remember… His face was red… wounded… blood was dripping upwards. His hands were up. I think I shouted his name but I didn’t know why that name or that he was James. There were all these crazy patterns in front of me - the smashed windscreen, but I just didn’t get it. The smashed glass on the roof seemed like weird stars, so it was like gravity was reversed and he had his hands up while bleeding up. I’m pretty sure I was shouting for the squad or the medic, then realising my hands were up as well, then I was thinking “Have we surrendered?” It was nonsensical. I hadn’t worked out we were upside down. I thought napalm was coming. Then I thought we were going to die. It must have been the gas tank… We were both trapped, upside down. I really can’t remember what I did after the smell of the fuel. It must have been enough.
The destruction of that moment is probably more crippling than the whole war put together, because he is my boy and reality just jumped off the tracks. Every frame of reference for the future was destroyed… it’s made something else but that crash was… worse than the bunker…
Scott didn’t know what the bunker was. He remained passive. His father was tracing a path in their space, showing Scott what he wanted to.
That bunker was the darkest hole of my life, until the crash. The darkness wasn’t just inside, underground. I see it now as all around but for a long time I thought it was mostly in us. But we were all surviving in darkness.
That gook bunker complex in the jungle... always probably tunnels underneath. Nelson… me, night recon counting the men in an’ out. Up in the trees in string hammocks, camouflaged. Fell asleep… dreamed… a white ghost, like a pale woman with red hair. I could feel her deep beauty, I loved her so much there was pain. I felt a spike… wrong… like I killed her. Woke up instantly but into blackness, like I was blind or just couldn’t wake up. I was confused, guilty, like full of bad memories, not a dream. Skin was crawling. Didn’t know where I was, nearly called out… then I heard a gook voice almost below me. Literally, they were below me. I froze in fear. I was in an abyss filled with gooks. Inside and out was torment… I was petrified into stillness, begging for… just begging to be untouched. The fear killed the dream. I came back. Ants were biting me the shit out of me. I tried to stay awake but sleep came back. Whenever I woke up I was being bitten to shit. The patrol came back in about two hours before dawn, then Nelson and I snuck back to join the other recons. We reckoned there was at least 80 men altogether.
Our two platoons - 100 men - went back to close around the complex from west, south and east sides. Four big bombs went in north side, 700 meters away. Booms right through me, wind from the shockwaves, then artillery started closest to us at the south sweeping north. Waves of SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! rain - a short hiss whistle then… it was falling screams into booming cries at the ground. Noises of jungle giving way, heaving, then the next rain.
Artillery and the bombs make you feel stronger but smaller… like following a bully into a fight. Charlie would attack us without all of that. He lived in tunnels, for Christ sake!
Feelings grew like some hole. No space for feelings in dark. I was afraid to see the guns’ carnage. Sucked into imagined pictures of limbs and faces in soil. Fear in my arms. Sapped of strength… lost my aggression. Nelson dragged me up, I was ashamed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I was saying. The other two, Kenny and Elms, were angry. I was shaking. My friend was dragging me to death, or to hell. If I’d have been him, I’d have done the same - taken my buddy with me to protect him and be in hell together.
The strikes ploughed jungle, smashing it. Busted trees, chopped up ground, splattered mud on the trunks. Zigzag collapsed trees, bushes pulled up and thrown… crater made of craters. Jungle noise swallowed by the barrage but now it was silent. Living jungle is never silent. Smells of earth, damp, explosive tang, bitter smoke, fresh wood, my stink in rainwater.
The strike left no sign of what was below ground. I wanted to get out but there was nowhere to go. A bang from up the line. Shouts of a bunker came back down. I got there, they’d blown it with a grenade. Two dead in the bunker entrance, with an MG. I was gripped by a wave of blackness; the dread-choking blanket over us all. Biting back puke.
“What about this plate?” Eli said. A tunnel entrance was in the bunker, probably booby trapped from below. Two minced gooks at the MG. Torsos ripped open. I just didn’t look, but the edges of my eyes still let them in a bit. The smell was strong enough to replace the view. Shit, blood, meat, wood.
Fuck, maannn. When shit becomes the smell of death, it changes life.
Orders came in.
“Platoon Alpha, reform, east side of crater, echelon right to move north. Platoon Delta, reform, west side of crater, echelon left to move north. Watch inside the crater, expect contact front and flanks.” That made sense to me. Orders to create order inside our disorder.
Fucking Nelson volunteered for the tunnel! That asshole! He was on the short side and brave or crazy enough. He’d looked after me. I couldn’t leave him. Fucking asshole!
Nel dragged away the plate with a line of cord around it, but no bang. Another grenade cleared the hole. Shirts, pistols, knives and torches were all we took into hell.
“Two tunnels. One east, one west. Not north. Tell Eli. Come down.” I wasn’t thinking, I just went in when Nel said. I should have stayed up there. The shaft was like five feet deep. I squatted into the two-way tunnel. It was three and a half feet high, two and a half wide. Bigger than some. Big enough for me. Nel was on his side in the west tunnel. Just his voice and his boots. “East is cut off, collapsed from the strike. Only this way to go. Red filter on. Fix the line. Follow, no light.” I planted my pencil tied to 50m of cord into the ground, put the loose coil down, tied the end to my boot. Eyes open or closed made no difference. Touch, sound and smell the only things. I couldn’t have been there without Nel.
Listening, smelling, feeling inside darkness. Crouched on one knee, head bent, back curled. I imagined the space bigger, some kind of cave that we chose to crawl in. Creating space in my head to push edges of darkness further back. The tunnel sloped down. Even near the shaft the air was fetid, stale, dank. I could smell myself and Nel in it. He went weight up, one step, weight down. Hands swept forwards and around, listening, repeat. Sometimes deliberate breath to smell changes, like paranoid rabbits stealing a warren. Forwards, downwards. My heartbeat and breathing filled my ears.
20 minutes to go 50 meters. I pulled the line in to replant it… kept my head off the tunnel. Dragging it into a support arch could dislodge them. They were slim, maybe two inches wide under the jungle. Strangely calm in the dark, small world of just motion, rhythm, sound and smell.
35 minutes in. I felt his hand on my chest tracing the tunnel was turning left, southwards. Tension now. He chopped my chest twice. Tripwire. An age until I heard the line cut. Around the tight bend the tunnel flattened. No noise. I breathed in something… musty cloth, oil maybe? He jabbed fingers twice straight into my chest, to ready for attack. Some kind of chamber. The right wall of the tunnel had gone, ceiling out of reach. Something in here… different smell. Equipment or a gun. Gook food too? Some low toned tang that went to the back of the throat. Nel’s grip said one step forwards. We went, then I felt.
Shock of contact sent a spike of surprise into me. Straight, cold metal, left to right, in air. A kind of… shelf, maybe, no deeper than to my elbow. Empty. Beyond it, the wall. Above it…
Under my boot something moved. My hand spun to my knife then the feeling again at my foot. Something under my boot being pulled towards the wall. I pulled the knife, slashed low below the shelf into a sack and a high scream. I pulled back and hopped right in one move, then the shot deafened us with a frame of truth. In the instant flash there was a hand, a grimaced ghoul face under the shelf. I fast stabbed out, teeth clenched in a vice of Hate, again, again, sweeping my left hand for the weapon or the arm. The knife plunged in to high squeals, like a petrified pig who couldn’t snort. The squelch then the warm spray. Again, again. I pushed my weight down onto an arm, stabbing, stabbing, until the arm was limp.
His groan was my panic. Sudden red light mapped the ceiling. All of my mind was instantly redrawn in shock. “I’m hit, right foot! The noise!” Nel waved his torch to his foot.
My torch copied Nel’s. He was on the floor, a foot away in just this ten foot antechamber in line with the tunnel. I was an arms’ length from its back wall in front of my face. The shelf was a narrow bed, another above it. The sack of dead woman underneath the bed, blood blackness draining into earth. One hand by the pistol, one hand by a string line. She’d pulled a line under my boot. Some signal to others I interrupted. The shot and noise was equal signal. Nel… on his back, agony held back by his arm over his mouth.
I tied Nel’s thigh with my line to shut his artery then cut it off my boot. I could feel my knots hurt him but his face was in black beyond the edge of the red in my face.
I fell on my left side to look up the next tunnel, then aimed my pistol and torch together. There was a scream from or in me. Inside, maybe 20 meters away, some squat rat, some beast crouched and closing. The head lifted to become some glimpse flash of narrow ghoul face of thin lines. I fired two shots into a scream and a slump. More ghouls behind, two more shots into the tunnel. It was blocked by the slumped rat, but there was space for someone behind the rat’s body to fire.
“We’re fucking going. Now!” Shouting was The Hate. The Hate becomes The Acts. The Acts don’t know boundaries or edges. They choose when to stop. In the dark there are no edges. On my back, I gripped him over his chest into his armpit. He had her pistol and his own. I heaved him with his kicks to our escape tunnel. His red light wobbled into the other tunnel. He aimed his light and three shots, then he pushed. I dragged him past the bend. On my back, with Nel in between my legs, I cradled him under the armpits, like rowers laid back. Then I just powered my heels into the ground and shoved back and back and back and back, feeling him doing the same until I couldn’t.
I hauled more, my ass and legs just red hot with pain. More pain, less distance this time. Then more and even less. I was dying. He was shot in his right foot, across the toes. He rolled over to crawl, screaming out to frighten me more. The dulled sound and no echo said claustrophobia. He tried to crawl, screaming through teeth. Maybe the rats were blocked by the body? Maybe they were crawling over it? Maybe there were two rats blocking their way to kill us? My ghoul crawled up my legs, heaving over me. His gritted face was right in mine, scraping stubble across me, grunt screaming into my eyes and ears through red light. His breath stank. All the hard parts of him dug into me, making me squirm into space that wasn’t there. I pushed him up, pushed him off to get him past. Blood spilled into my face and mouth from his boot, choking me. It snuck into me through holes in desperate breaths. Poison… but fuel to Hate. He banged her gun against my head, leaving it for me.
My ghoul’s shuffling, scraping, grunting was like a hunt in hell. I pushed with this heel and that, then looked at the bend in red light. Then again. Soil filled my ass as my belt dug in. Nothing from the bend yet, not even noise over our noise. Nothing at the bend. My light was their target. I pushed again and again, then hit Nel. It was no distance.
He pushed off again in constant noise. Something snaked over my face. It was the line tied around his leg. I pushed again and again into Nel. I looked back to the bend. “Keep going, keep going. Just keep fucking going!” I was sucking in dust and soil and stench, drying the iron in my mouth, filling my throat with clag. I wanted to grenade the bend, close the tunnel.
“Cut your line off. Cut your line off! Give me the rest of your line!” My throat filled. My eyes were on the bend as I puked through my teeth, refreshing the air with iron and puke. There was shadow and motion. I pushed back and back and back and back and back into Nel, into a squeal that wet my head.
I could barely sit up. I dug the anglehead torch into the corner of the tunnel scrabbling to point it at the bend. Eyes fixed back to the bend, I dug up into the roof with my knife to scrape behind the support. They were coming. Keep scraping. Keep scraping. I was burying myself.
The massive BANG! CRACK! that filled our grave jolted me to fire. I hadn’t even seen the rat. I tried to burrow into the wall, then put two more shots into the inside corner of the bend to cut through it into the room. Some noise. I put another shot in. I kept digging at the tons of soil above. The Hate driving The Act. I saw a face moving in to the light. It jolted after my shot, then it fell into the tunnel to gape at me, eyes sucked into black. Thin lines turned to a big round.
“Fucking go, fucking go!” Two more bangs from the ghouls. Soil sprayed from the wall where the shots landed, at the edge of the light. I shot back at the bend. I could feel the knife get through. The gaping face slid back from the bend. They were coming again. I slid the line round the support then pulled it through. I pushed to get away, line sliding through my hand. I kept pushing, leaving the torch, dragging the line into a bigger loop behind me.
“KEEP GOING YOU FUCKER! MAKE IT MAKE IT!” I was screaming at the bend. The rats’ bang crack slid straight up the tunnel side, past my left. I didn’t even see movement. I just put two more shots out. I pushed back and back and back and back, line sliding in my hand. Pushing again, back-worming my way to the end of the line. I was breathing out life into my own grave. The red bend to hell growing smaller.
Two more bangs, maybe aimed at the torch. I yanked the line. It wouldn’t move. I dug in my heels, pull pushed arms and legs. A crack and the line shot to slack. The red bend was still there.
Panic. I rolled, back up against the low roof. I tried to shuffle run in my own blackness, leaking life. I smacked into Nel’s foot. His scream was…
I was blocked in a grave, waiting for demons. The Hate turned to me. I hated myself and my own stupidity for going in. For nothing. The red bend moved. I fired. Keep them back. Then I began to hate Nel, so slow. I wanted to piss. My arms buzzed with Hate and Fear and Kill. I fired again to release it. Fuck you, rats! Stay back! I slow fired at the bend till empty, then reloaded. We would die stabbing and biting, I knew it.
“I’m here! Come on! ARGH!” Nel screamed. I didn’t care about his pain, or mine. I clamped my eyes shut through those final meters, God knows how many there were. I just kept going until I hit him.
“OUT! OUT! GET US OUT!” Nel was screaming up, then his boots cleared the light. I took one step forward and burst up into the stench of blood and shit.
We’d worked out that we were all fucked. The complex was bigger than we thought and it wasn’t just to the north. We came out of the hole knowing that it went west, then south, while the platoons were moving north. Hate kept Acting. I put Nel and Eli on that MG, corpses piled on the plate, them standing on the bodies to keep the rats in. I fucking raced to the squad to tell them we might be surrounded, then their MG sparked up.
Ghouls rose up to make me pay for taking her pistol. For stabbing her to death under a bed underground. Half my platoon came back with me towards the bunker to fight south, half stayed to cover north around to west. The hell in the tunnel had leaked up into the jungle. I can’t even remember all of it. Eli was dead on the gun when I got back and Nel was in shock. The squad was pumping out cover fire. I just humped Nel to the squad, to Kelly on the ‘60 so he wasn’t alone. Danny was ramming dressings into his boot and some morphine in his leg. We stayed together, moving the gun and dragging Nel, shouting targets at him, keeping him fighting to keep him alive with The Hate. I can’t remember how long it was for. There was definitely more artillery. Nearly sundown… that’s when someone got a napalm strike across their lines. Danger Close… They were within 200 meters. When what you see doesn’t relate to what you feel, you get lost. I felt the impact ignition, the wind from behind going into the burn. It sucks the life out of the jungle. Oily fire smell, slightly chemically and a bit like gas. The greasy heat kept me down with Nel. I thought it was going to swallow us, it got hot so quick. When I looked up there was this wall of black smoke with yellow, orange flame clawing up into it. We were revelling in that, screaming out The Hate for relief. Not then, but after, I thought the woman in the dream was the napalm - I was in love with the red flame that was my source of life but that love was all those other feelings, all conflicted, and it was the end at the same time, so love was pain.
We hadn’t won, we just ran. Nel got out, I put him on the ride. From the air, that was where I saw that their civilians must have been in the tunnels. Civilian bodies and some alive were down there. Kids, families together and blasted apart. A baby was looking up at us from under its mother. The gunners just sprayed out fire so we could get out. I saw and just flatlined inside. Faces and limbs in burning soil. I was so stupid as a man in madness that I just lived a loop I felt coming, I just couldn’t stop or change it, or understand my own senses. Fear and The Hate tunes out everything and then there’s nothing to stop The Acts.
Charlie had confused us then he surrounded us and cut the platoon to half. All that with no planes, no artillery, living underground, surrounded by kids. When you think The Hate is what keeps you alive - and in the dark it does - it can stay, even when the sun rises. The Army didn’t tell me that. Vivian did. She stopped me living through The Hate.
Morton’s eyes opened. “Don’t tell…” He eyes seemed set back, timidly begging for something.
It’s OK, dad. How do you feel?
“I’m not sure if I’m awake.”
Do you feel like waking up?
“I want to walk around. I feel like I need to run. I want to tell the woman in the tunnel I’m sorry. I want to see James and tell him I’m sorry. I want to see his success. I want to thank your mom for everything.”
What I began to understand within days and which became patently clear within months was that, what was going on here was not was I had been told. What was going on here was nuts and I wanted to get out.
I knew if I were still alive on March the 5th 1968, they'd stick me on an airplane in Da Nang we used to call it the freedom bird and I could fly away and forget the whole thing. Turned out not to be quite so easy to forget it, but that was the notion and, and certainly for my last eight, nine months in Vietnam I ceased to think, I quite literally ceased to think about why I was there or what I was doing.
The sole purpose for my being in Vietnam at that point was to stay alive until I could get out. Then the reason for that is that, you know, the kinds of questions that began to present themselves were just, the questions themselves were ugly and I didn't want to know the answers. It's, it's like it's like banging on a door, you knock on a door and the door opens slightly and behind that door it's dark and there's loud noises coming like there's like there's wild animals in there or something and you peer into the darkness and you can't see what's there but you can hear all these ugly stuff.
You want to step into that room? No way, you just sort of back out quietly pull the door shut behind you and walk away from it and that's what was going on. The questions themselves were too ugly to even ask, let alone if I had to deal with the answers.
Now part of what was going on, as I said, I could not have made sense of what I was seeing and doing in Vietnam because I did not have a full deck of cards. I needed to have an understanding of the political historical realities that brought us to Vietnam before I could make sense of what I was seeing. I began to acquire the other cards in the deck during the three years or so after I got back from Vietnam, but while I was there nothing made sense. Because I kept trying to you know, play this game with 27 cards instead of 52 cards and it kept not coming out right and I didn't know why all I knew was that it was nuts and it became, it became clear within three or four months.
That my reasons for being in Vietnam were not clear. I mean this notion of defending the people against these invaders from North Vietnam the people hated me. The Vietnamese people hated me and it was perfectly, that was perfectly clear. I mean the people didn't say good morning to you, people didn't, I mean people hated me.
I know that other people's experience some other people's experience was different, but in my own experience the Vietnamese people hated me and I gave them every reason to hate me.
I beat them, I sometimes kill them, I destroy their houses, I destroy their crops, I destroy their fields, I destroy their culture. Why in the hell should those people like me?
And I could see that I was doing that, and I could see that nothing we were doing was having any impact on the war itself.
Non Gradus Anus Rodentum