Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 1996)
PAGE 13 instantly swallowed by billows of black smoke that were as immediately consumed by a terrible heat. The village caught fire. Houses exploded into flame; their thatched roofs burst into the air. Palm trees flared into torches. Even the mists in the fields were burned away, and we vtfio cowered at the bottom of the slope were slapped by the heat. The jets rolled back and came again. They dived down the same ridges and across the fields and dropped their last canisters into the flaming village. I stared at the fires. I felt the stinging heat against my nose and eyes and smelled the acrid smoke blown off the fires by the wind. Helicopter gunships flew in a few minutes after the jets left, and though they were tossed wildly by the wind they careened over the paddies like large dragonflies. I heard the heavy clatter of their machineguns as they shot up the fields on the other side of the village Two heli copters shot rockets into the burning village then raked it with machinegun fire. A single helicopter broke off and flew towards us and landed next to green smoke erupting from a grenade tossed by an officer into the paddy in front of us. The point man's body was heaved into its open side door like a piece of rubbish. The helicopter lifted unsteadily into the air and with a great burst of power swung onto its side and arched around the mountain and flew across the wind. It rejoined its flock, vtfiich climbed over the jungled mountains and followed the jets south east to the coast. We were left alone again. The sounds of machines and guns were replaced by final explosions of the fires in the village. We waited until they burned down and crossed the paddies at dusk. The wind blew into our faces and stung our eyes with smoke and ashes. A thin man led us this time. He took us past burnt animal pens, each with its own dead water buffalo. The blackened stalks of palm trees towered above us as we entered the ruined village. We first came upon an old man whose skin was burned green and black. He lay on a raised bed of wood that was charred and smoking. He wore a tattered purple robe that had caught on fire but was not completely burned. His eyes were closed, flies buzzed around his open mouth, his stiffened arms and hands were raised toward the sky. The wind blew at his scorched wiiite hair. We next passed an elderly man and woman whose bodies lay curled like fruit peelings in front of a house that had burned to a bed of glowing coals. The thin man hacked through a wall of broken and smoking bushes with a machete. We emerged from the ruined hedgerow into a stone courtyard that was bordered on three sides by a low stone wall. At its center was a house, its wiiite walls built of stucco and mud topped by a peaked clay-cobbled roof that had partially collapsed. The walls were stained by moss and in parts over grown with vines, some of which had been set afire. The court yard was filled with the bodies of children. Some of them were horribly burned or mangled. Others seemed only asleep, their skins a bright cherry color as if they had merely been sunburned. A few bodies were not complete and others more than one, possibly fused by heat. There were at least a score of them — older children, young children and babies. I stopped and stared at them. I tried to weilk away but I could not move. I did not want to look at them but I was horrified and could not stop staring. I almost vomited the same instant my eyes filled with tears. My mind started to unstick. Thin calluses that had spread over my sensibilities blistered and ruptured like scabs of wounds. I was engulfed in despair and shame. Ugly sights of broken children in cities and villages superimposed over the bodies, starved and emaciated children whose arms or legs were fly infested stumps, whose small bodies were raw and bleeding from wounds and sores, who begged and stole for food like desperate young wolves and died alone and unmoumed, sometimes murdered by each other. I tried to shut them out of my eyes for months. I had deafened my ears to their screams and pleas but they persistently haunted my thoughts and filled my dreams. I knew instantly and with chilling horror that the dead children in the courtyard had been left there intentionally, carried from all parts of the burning village by survivors who fled into the fields away from us, perhaps many of them killed by the helicopters that hunted in the wake of the jets on the far side of the valley My friend Willie Mac stopped and stood with me over the bodies. His eyes were empty. His gaunt face expressionless. Marines passed us and moved deeper into the ravaged village Their rifles darted nervously, like snakes searching for prey. A few looked at the children. Most tried not to They did not want to add these deaths to their imperiled lives. They saved their sympathy for themselves. 'They left them for us," I said almost in a whisper. I felt Willie Mac's sudden hard gripping of my arm, pulling me away "Come on,” he said "It's no good" I stumbled along with him through the broken village We came across more bodies, steaming with flies, and in some instances parts of bodies, and the bodies of several dead pigs, dogs and water buffalo that had been cremated in pens behind burnt houses. We found some Marines sitting on the hard dirt floor of a partially roofed house which was fringed by a grove of blackened palm trees "Find some place to crap out." one of the Marines said. 'We’re staying the night." We shared the village with the dead who remained vtfiere they died. Heavy rain fell most of the night. I leaned against the doorframe of a house that was not completely PIERCE IN THORNS The tall guy's name was Pierce. He looked like Robert Mitchum and wore gloves like an oldtime gunfighter when he took his rifle to work with him, which was every day including weekends. He was Italian (called himself a "guinea”, though you wouldn't know it by his name) from Rhode Island. Because he was a great unstructured cynic he had tattooed on his back a 12- inch face of Christ in thorns. It was in three colors, red, blue and green, and covered most of his back. He was drunk when it was needled; it took six hours and he passed out four times before walking away with the new scab as sober as God. After he was dead a chaplain was shocked at the tattoo (he damn near levitated when I turned Pierce's body backside up) and asked why. "He thought Jesus was a joke," I said. A month before a sniper shot him between the shoulder blades, Pierce charged Viet Cong trenches on a day of pure shit. They had us cold in the murky paddies in front of a village in the middle of a pineapple forest one leaky August afternoon. Pierce instantly went after the local patriots who were mangling foreign devils into bloody shreds with machineguns and mortars, shout ing as he charged, "BAATMAAN!" He made headlong dashes at the guerrillas, his shouts of "BAA TMAAAAN!" heard over every thing else. The homeboys frantically tried to biowhim away, throw ing everything at him but their gold teeth, then abandoned their trenches when he was still on his feet and coming straight at them screaming "BAAATMAAAN!" And that was Ron Pierce. Unhit and unrestrained that busy day, he died a month later on a day of no consequence when a local shooter put a bullet in his back, just above Jesus' crown of thorns, and blew out his lungs and heart. A single shot crackling through the torpid September afternoon, as daily a sound as the snorting ugly black pigs, the scrawny squawking chickens, barking dogs too young or mangy for the cooking pot, laughing and shrieking wide-eyed potbellied kids wearing t-shirts that never quite covered their genitals; as ordinary a sound as the screams and whimpering of the dead and dying in thousands of villages in a war that seemed never to end. The big man wth the face of Christ on his back and blue-birds flying across his pecs fell like a tree reluctantly crashing to a forest floor The rest of us were instantly outraged and trashed the village. I ran towards a half-bombed church from which the sniper had fired and where a few moments before, in the dead quiet of early afternoon, a priest stood smiling and bobbing his bald head as we passed. The priest became a sacrifice for Pierce, his small thin body churning in his robes toward the altar and back door — I was raising my rifle to cut him down when a blast so close to my ear it almost blew it off my head tumbled the tiny man into the makeshift altar beneath a palm-hewn cross We burned two villages that day in our grieving madness and killed everything too slow to escape our rifles. The smell of flesh and smoke scorched the sky when trucks rumbled down a muddy road to pull us out of the field Pierce's large dead body was wapped in a poncho and shoved into a helicopter that barely got off the ground The pilot fought a strong wind blowing off the South China Sea and just avoided collision with tall trees by whipping the bird on its side and flitting between skinny stalked palms. He flew back over us and dipped the chopper as if in salute to say, your friend's okay, I'm taking him home Behind us in two smoldering villages lay the slaughter ed revenge for the death of our friend An irreverent, lusty and laughing adventurer who after all did little more than shoot a rifle or throw a grenade except, being a modem man, he was also able to push the buttons of western civilization, turn the key to the ignition of the Porsche he had saved his combat pay to buy, flick electric switches in deadbolt-locked lathe and plaster archi- tectocrities mass-produced on the great plains our ancestors plowed up and exterminated the Indians to build My very good friend and badass mentor Ronald Pierce died in a war in which he was an exceptional and instinctual warrior (not a killer though his talent for combat forced him to kill). Swift merciless vengeance for his death obliterated dimin utive Asian homefolk, smaller and crunched in their deaths, who lay inside or in front of mud huts that didn't have televisions or macadam driveways for Porsches. The cowpaths that led from their impoverished villages out to the open paddies were not cluttered with the ugly urban junkyards of modem USA I regret I did not have the presence of mind or temerity to skin Pierce and preserve his tattoo of Christ in Thoms I think he might have expected me to I wish I had saved it from the maggots, tanned and framed it for my wall where it might hang alongside a painting of my skull shining in ocean depths which was painted by another Vietnam veteran (also ex-USMC) who thought a journey across the big pond several years ago would be my last (an attempt to imitate Somerset Maugham) and gave it to me when I returned destroyed and stared out into the dark toward the moldy courtyard and the dead children My vision was obscured by smashed burnt dwellings and hedgerows and by the ghostly density of rain and fogs that rose from the mud and were flipped by the wind into tattered streamers that seemed to be souls leaving the dead, wreathing around the scattered ashes of their homes a final moment before vanishing into the stormy sky I imagined the bodies of the children withered and curled like leaves fallen from trees, pounded by monsoon rains into compost, their blood leached by the rain, their horrible bums cooled and softened. I turned and shouted into the darkness of the house "Why didn't they get the hell out of here! They knew we were coming. They knew we'd blow them up." "Shut up!" Willie Mac hissed. "You almost got yourself convinced it's their own fault they're dead " "Bullshit....!" 'You probably wouldn't even give a shit if you hadn't seen the kids." "I've seen kids blown away ." "Sure, but not like that," he said quietly. 'You're scared You think those kids are your death warrant You think they're going to get you for this.” "What about the sniper?” "What about him? All he did was pop one of our boys We turned their kids into torches." Of course he was right I was terrified by the hatred behind the display of the dead children and at the vengeance their deaths demanded I felt I would be hunted down for their murders, and if I escaped Vietnam that eventually my own mind would be the hunter. I smoked a cigarette and rolled into a poncho on the floor of the house but was unable to sleep. I lay awake for a long time and finally became aware that it was my mother's birthday. I had forgotten Perhaps the dead children reminded me I wondered if any of their mothers remained alive, and I felt again my fear of their grief and hatred "Happy birthday mother," I whispered. 'Your kids are dead." 'You say something?" Willie Mac's sleepy voice croaked "I was thinking about my mother." 'You're a cesspool of neuroses." "I just remembered it's her birthday." "Happy birthday mother," Willie Mac said. The next day we left the dead village and climbed the mountains on the far side of the valley. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOTHER is from a book in prog ress. Some readers (and listeners) might recognize it from earlier printings, in this paper (1982), Rain '85 (Clatsop Com munity College) and other esoteric publications, and it has been narrated on the radio (KMUN-FM, Astoria) and at a few literary readings. I dedicate this printing, as well as all others, to my mother who detests war and thought me a fool for enlisting in one, and to a w«man I know who shall be 30 in late October, bom the day we walked away from the children laying in their courtyard and the village we made a pyre THE OLD MAN has appeared in this newspaper (1981) and in anthologies of Vietnam writings, in particular 1st Casualty Press (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) volume Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans (second part of a trilogy Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans and Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam) and The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs <S Poems (St. Martin's Press), edited by H Bruce Franklin, published earlier this year PIERCE IN THORNS was published in the NCTE in December 1981 R L. Pierce was KIA September 7, 1966 r LOBE & ASSOCIATES ROBERT LOBE, MSW, ACSW Licensed Clinical Social Worker 555 Bond Street ADO71M Astoria, OR 97103 (503)325-8438 FAX (503) 325-4402 res . (503) 861-1 no -MPMc PUBLISHED BY GAFF PRESS, ASTORIA X I
