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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
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