It's hard to believe that just before I left home I
was celebrating my eighteenth birthday with my family. Mom made a cake, my favorite,
yellow cake with chocolate frosting. She even wrote "Happy Birthday"
on it. My sister gave me a picture she had drawn, it was of me and her at the
beach. Dad gave me a beauty of a pocketknife with a hand-carved handle. That was
MY day, the last good day I've had in awhile.
Not long after my birthday I shipped out to Basic Training. No one knew my number
would come up that fast. My life was just not intended to be going this way. I'm
supposed to go to college, become a doctor or lawyer, make my parents proud. But
I had to leave. Leave my family, my friends, my town, my country.
I saw my Dad cry for the first time that day. And now that memory stays with me,
every day and every night. It haunts my thoughts, creeping in when I am most vulnerable,
alone and thinking.
Basic Training was a blur. We were taught just enough to go on; weapons, hand-to-hand
combat, survival training. I am not the trained killer we soldiers are made out
to be. It took me a month to assemble my rifle correctly. And I wasn't the only
one. We were all so young and naive, unaware of what was on the horizon.
After Basic I was sent straight over there, to Vietnam. I didn't expect it to
be so beautiful. I was stationed right on the beach, and just yards from the most
beautiful forest I had ever seen. In any other lifetime, this place would have
been a tropical retreat. But I wasn't there to marvel at the splendor of this
foreign land. I was there for America, for my country, for my family, or so I
was told.
My unit was ordered to patrol the surrounding areas of base camp. A light sentence
compared to the stories we heard from other, visiting troops. For three months
we traversed through the forest. Stomping all over this gorgeous habitat that
was not our own. Ready to pull the trigger at any sudden movement; the sway in
a branch, the gentle, downward spiral of a leaf. Some guys started to complain
that our patrol was too boring. We longed for action, for heroic stories we could
write home about, with lingering thoughts of a hometown parade and the key to
our cities. If only we knew then the truth of what we were longing for.
It was a Friday morning when we were sent to that village. I don't remember the
name of it; I don't want to. There had been some unverified reports of futile
activity. Our job was to make our presence known, and let it be recognized who
controlled that land. We expected to find locals returning for necessities, the
village had been abandoned once the Army arrived. We rode up on that village completely
unaware of what was about to transpire.
Before my foot was even on the ground there was a huge explosion. The truck in
front of us was engulfed in flames. I still hear the shrill cries of the men from
that truck in my dreams. They were running for their lives, flames covering their
entire bodies. The faster and harder they ran the more skin dripped from their
bones.
I didn't have time to absorb what was happening. We had been ambushed. Explosions
were going off all around me. Men were screaming. Gunfire was rampant. Bodies
were dropping silent to the ground. I didn't have time, there was no time. In
one bold movement I began spraying bullets into the village. Sweeping back and
forth, back and forth, bullet cartridges piling up beneath me. I saw men drop
at the breath of my gun. I kept the trigger down, mowing through round after round,
filling the enemy with the searing heat of my wrath.
In that moment I became a man. I was capable of stealing human life, of holding
it in my hand and choosing its fate. My victims had no faces, no names, no histories.
There were me on the other side of the fence. In Vietnam I had no face, I had
no name, no family, no age, I was nothing. I was a void filling a U.S. Army uniform.
My parents feared I would be killed over there, but it was me doing the killing.
Not only was I a man, I was a murderer.
*written March 17, 2003 for an Advanced Writing class