rear corner of the house, peeks around the corner. Cowboy waits for Lance Corporal Stutten to pop a green smoke as a signal that his fire team is in position as a blocking force. We wait. When green smoke begins to pour from a drainage ditch behind the first house at the far end of the street Cowboy waves his hand and we all open fire at the first house at our end of the street. One at a time, we run across the street to the first house, joining Cowboy. Cowboy waves his hand around the corner and Lance Corporal Stutten's fire team opens up with their weapons on full automatic, pouring hundreds of high-velocity copper-jacketed bullets into the rear of the first house at their end of the street. Animal Mother continues to chew up the fronts of all the mansions with his black steel machine gun. The tank fires a second round. The ground floor of the first house is blown apart. The tank grinds forward twenty yards, stops, fires again. The second story of the second house explodes. Cowboy leads us into the mansion at our end of the street. Inside, we leapfrog from corner to corner. Cowboy pops a frag and underhands it into somebody's kitchen. The detonation rocks the whole house, numbs our ears. Rafter Man steps forward. He gestures to Cowboy, jerks his thumb at the ceiling. Cowboy holds up a circled thumb and index finger, "okay." Rafter Man pops a frag and pitches it up a stairwell to the second story. The explosion splits the plaster over our heads. Outside, up the street, the tank fires again. Cowboy punches me in the chest with his knuckles. Then he punches Rafter Man and Alice. He aims his right index finger at Donlon, then at the deck. Donlon nods and begins to silently point out the positions he wants the men in the squad to take. Cowboy waves his hand and we follow him up the stairs. Upstairs, Alice kicks out a window and we all hop out onto the roof. The tank is two houses away. It fires. We drop our gear and jump the six-foot chasm between houses. On the roof of the second house Cowboy stands up and signal Lance Corporal Stutten, who waves back with his poncho. Bullets from Lance Corporal Stutten's fire team stop hitting the rest of the house we're standing on. I double-time to the front of the house and I wave to Animal Mother. Bullets from Animal Mother's machine gun stop hitting the front of the house. The tank fires. The shell bursts. Shrapnel whines over us. We converge on a skylight. I drop a frag through the glass. The grenade explodes in an invisible room below. Concussion shatters the skylight. We drop through the ragged rectangular hole into somebody's library. Shrapnel has mangled leatherbound books. I pick up a small leatherbound book for a souvenir. The author is Jules Verne; the title is in French. I stuff the book into my thigh pocket and reach to the front of my flak jacket for another grenade. We work our way through the house, fragging every hallway, every room. But we can't find the sniper. The tank fires into the second story of the house next door. I say, "No time." Cowboy shrugs. "He wasted T.H.E. Rock." I take a few steps down the stairs. Cowboy holds up his hand. "Listen." Animal Mother's M-60 is ripping up the roof over our heads. I say, "Is Mother dinky-dow? Crazy?" Cowboy shakes his head. "No. Mother is a prick, but he's a good grunt." We run back to the library. We drag a heavy antique desk to the ruined skylight and Cowboy climbs up onto it and lifts himself back onto the roof. The crack of a Simonov sniper's carbine pierces the muted rhythm of Mother's machine gun. Cowboy falls back through the skylight. Alice, who has climbed up onto the desk, catches Cowboy and eases him down to the desktop. I pop a frag. I climb up onto the desk and take hold of the roof with my left hand. I let the spoon fly. The spoon phinnnnings away and rattles across the floor. I hold the sweaty green oval for three seconds and, lifting myself up, I flip it up and back so that it rolls across the roof directly over us. The frag bursts, spraying seven hundred and fifty pieces of steel wire across the roof. The ceiling splits. Alice hugs Cowboy. Plaster and splintered wood bounce off my helmet. Rafter Man jumps up onto the desk and lift himself up onto the roof. Surprised, I pull myself up after him. The tank fires into the ground floor of the house next door. Rafter Man and I crawl on our bellies on the roof. Behind us, Alice lifts Cowboy over his head like a wrestler, deposits him gently upon the roof. Then Alice climbs up. He picks Cowboy up in his arms as though Cowboy were an oversized baby. Doc Jay calls to us from the roof of the first house. Alice pulls a tent rope from a thigh pocket and ties it under Cowboy's arms. He flips the other end of the rope to Doc Jay. Doc Jay gets a good grip on the rope and braces himself as Alice lowers Cowboy into the chasm between the houses. Doc Jay pulls in the slack as Cowboy falls. Cowboy's limp body swings over and thuds into the wall beneath Doc Jay's feet. Doc Jay grits his teeth, pulls Cowboy up. Alice looks back at me, but I wave him on. He leaps over to the first house. Doc Jay gathers up all of our gear and Alice throws Cowboy over his shoulder and they start back down. Rafter Man has crawled up to the crest of the roof. He peeks over the crest. Bang. A hiss. I crawl up beside Rafter Man. I take a peek. From behind a low chimney at the opposite corner of the roof a thin black line protrudes. We hear the incredibly loud clanking of the tank as it rolls on the street below. It stops. Animal Mother and Lance Corporal Stutten stop firing. "Let's go," I say. I grab Rafter Man's shoulder. "The tank can waste the gook." Rafter Man doesn't look at me. He pulls away. I turn away and I duck walk to the edge of the roof. I stand up and am about to jump across when the house explodes beneath me. I fall on my back. The sniper is moving. Rafter Man jumps over the crest of the roof and slides down the incline on his ass. I try to stand up. But all of my bones have shifted one inch to the left. Suddenly a foot steps on my chest, pinning me. The sniper looks down, surprised. The sniper sees that I'm helpless, glances back at Rafter Man, gets ready to jump across to the other roof. Rafter Man runs back up the incline and slides back down on his ass, ten yards away. I reach for my grease gun. The sniper turns toward Rafter Man and raises her SKS carbine. The sniper is the first Victor Charlie I've seen who was not dead, captured, or far, far away. She is a child, no more than fifteen years old, a slender Eurasian angel with dark, beautiful eyes, which, at the same time, are the hard eyes of a grunt. She's not quite five feet tall. Her hair is long and black and shiny, held together by rawhide cord tied in a bow. Her shirt and shorts are mustard-colored khaki and look new. Slung diagonally across her chest, separating her small breasts, is a white cloth tube fat with sticky reddish rice. Her B.F. Goodrich sandals have been cut from discarded tires. Around her tiny waist hangs a web belt from which dangle homemade hand grenades with hollow wooden handles, made by stuffing black powder into Coca-Cola cans, a knife for cleaning fish, and six canvas pouches containing banana clips for the AK-47 assault rifle slung on her back. Bang. Rafter Man is firing his M-16. Bang. Bang. The sniper lowers her weapon. She looks at Rafter Man. She looks at me. She tries to raise her weapon. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bullets shock flesh. Rafter Man is firing. Rafter Man's bullets are punching the life out of the sniper. The sniper falls off the roof. The tank fires into the ground floor beneath us. The house shakes. I stand up. I feel like a dead man's shit. I walk to the front of the house. I wave to the blond tank commander. He swings a fifty-caliber machine gun around and aims it at me. I step into full view on the edge of the roof. I wave an "all clear." The tank commander gives me a thumbs-up. I pop a green smoke grenade and I drop it on the roof. I limp over to the skylight and I climb back down into the library. Rafter Man has already jumped into the library and is running down the shrapnel-scarred stairs. Down on the street I watch as the tank rolls up to the last house still standing. I wave another "all clear" and the tank commander gives me another smile and another thumbs-up and then the tank fires, blasting the top floor. If fires again, blasting the ground floor. The tank commander's great mechanical body grumbles contentedly and rumbles away. Cowboy double-times to meet me. He punches me on the arm. "Look!" Cowboy touches his right ear, carefully. "Look!" There's a neat little round hole through his right ear and a semicircular nick on the top of his left ear. "See? A cheap Heart! The round went through the helmet from behind, spun all the way around my head, then came out and hit me in the arm..." Cowboy holds up his right forearm, which has already been bandaged. "Did you see that tank? Was that tank bad? What a honey." Doc Jay catches up to Cowboy, grabs him roughly, pushes him down. Cowboy sits on a splintered tree stump while Doc Jay tears the waxy brown wrapper off a compress bandage and ties the bandage around Cowboy's bloody head. Alice and I walk around to the rear of the house. We find Rafter Man standing over the sniper, drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola. Rafter Man grins. He says, "Things go better with Coke." Animal Mother walks up and Rafter Man says, "Look at her! Look at her!" We all stand over the sniper. The sniper is drawing her breath with great effort. Guts that look like colorful plastic have squirted out through bullet holes. The back of the sniper's right leg and her right buttock have been torn off. She grits her teeth and then makes a sound like a dog that has been run over. Lance Corporal Stutten leads his fire team to the sniper. "Look at that," says Lance Corporal Stutten. "It's a girl. She's all busted up." "Look at her!" Rafter Man is saying. He struts around the moaning lump of torn meat. "Look at her! Am I bad? Am I a menace? Am I a life taker? Am I a heart breaker?" Alice kneels and unbuckles the sniper's web belt and jerks it from under her body. The sniper whimpers. She speaks to us in French. Alice tosses the bloody belt to Rafter Man. The sniper begins to pray in Vietnamese. Rafter Man asks, "What's she saying?" I shrug. "What difference does it make?" Animal Mother spits. "It's gonna get dark. We better hump back to the company area." I say, "What about the gook?" "Fuck her," says Animal Mother. "Let her rot." "We can't just leave her here," I say. Animal Mother takes a giant step toward me, puts his face up close to mine. "Hey, asshole, Cowboy is down. You're fresh out of friends, motherfucker. I'm running this squad. I was a platoon sergeant before they busted me. I say we leave the gook for the mother-loving rats." Rafter Man is buckling on his NVA belt. The belt has a dull-silver buckle with a star engraved in the center. "Joker is a sergeant." Animal Mother is surprised. He stares at Rafter Man, then at me. Then: "That don't cut no shit out here. This is the field, motherfucker. You ain't a grunt. You don't pack the gear to be a grunt. You want to fuck with me? Huh? You want to throw some hands?" I say, "I wouldn't run this squad for a million dollars. I'm just saying that we can't leave the gook like this." "I don't care," says Animal Mother. "Go on and waste her." I say, "No. Not me." "Then we saddle up and move...now." I look at the sniper. She whimpers. I try to decide what I would want if I were down, half dead, hurting bad, surrounded by my enemies. I look into her eyes, trying to find the answer. She sees me. She recognizes me--I am the one who will end her life. We share a bloody intimacy. As I lift my grease gun she is praying in French. I jerk the trigger. Bang. One round enters the sniper's left eye and as the bullet exits it tears off the back of her head. The squad is silent. Then Alice grunts, flashes a big grin. "Man, you are one hard dude. How come you ain't a grunt?" Cowboy and Doc Jay are standing beside me. Cowboy says, "Mother, I'm serviceable. Joker, that's a well done. You're hard.' Animal Mother spits. He takes a step, kneels, zips out his machete. With one powerful blow he chops off her head. He picks the head up by its long black hair and holds it high. He laughs and says, "Rest in pieces, bitch." And he laughs again. He walks around and sticks the bloody ball of gore into all our faces. "Hard? Now who's hard? Now who's hard, motherfuckers?" Cowboy looks at Animal Mother and sighs. "Joker is hard, Mother. You...you're just mean." Animal Mother pauses, spits, throws the head into a ditch. Cowboy says, "Let's move. We done our job." Animal Mother picks up his M-60 machine gun, lays it across his shoulders, struts over to me. He smiles. "You know, Shortround never did see the frag that wasted him, that little kike." Animal Mother unhooks a hand grenade from the front of his flak jacket and pushes it into my chest--hard. Mother looks around, then smiles at me again. "Nobody shits on the Animal, motherfucker. Nobody." I hook the grenade onto my flak jacket. Alice picks up the sniper's rifle. "Hey, number one souvenir!" Rafter Man is standing over the sniper's decapitated corpse. He aims his M-16 and fires a long burst of automatic fire into the body. Then he says, "That's mine, Alice." He takes the SKS from Alice and examines it closely. He looks down and admires his new belt. "I shot her first, Joker. She'd have died. That's one confirmed for me." I say, "Sure, Rafter. You wasted her." Rafter Man says, "I did. I wasted her. I fucking blew her away." He looks at his NVA rifle belt again. He holds up the SKS. "Wait until Mr. Payback sees this!" Alice is down on his knees beside the corpse. With his machete he chops off the sniper's feet. He puts the feet into his blue canvas shopping bag. He chops off the sniper's finger and takes her gold ring. We wait until Rafter Man takes photographs of the dead gook and we wait until Alice takes photographs of Rafter Man posing with his SKS set in his hip and his foot on the mutilated remains of the enemy sniper. Then, as we're moving out, Rafter Man sees a reflection of his face in the jagged teeth of a shattered window, sees the new smile upon his face. Rafter Man stares at himself for a long time and then, dropping the carbine, Rafter Man just walks off down the road, not looking back, not responding to our questions. Cowboy waves his hand and we move out. Nobody says anything about Rafter Man. We hump back to the Forbidden City and set in for the night. I mark the short-timer's calendar on my flak jacket--fifty-five days and a wake-up left in country. Later, in the dark, Rafter Man comes back. The fighting continues all around us all night, sputters of violence here and there, a mortar round, a curse, a scream. We sleep like babies. The sun that rises in Hue on the morning of February 25, 1968, illuminates a dead city. United States Marines have liberated Hue to the ground. Here, in the heart of the ancient imperial capital of Viet Nam, a living shrine to the Vietnamese people on both sides, green Marines in the green machine have liberated a cherished past. Green Marines in the green machine have shot the bones of sacred ancestors. Wise, like Solomon, we have converted Hue into rubble in order to save it. The next morning Delta Six cuts us some slack and we spend the day hunting gold bars in the emperor's palace. We enter the throne room of the old emperors. The throne is blood red, studded with inlaid mirrors. I wish I could live in the Imperial Palace. Bright pieces of porcelain make the walls vivid. The roof is orange tile. There are stone dragons, ceramic urns, brass cranes standing on the backs of turtles, and many other fine objects of undetermined origin and function but obviously of great value and great beauty and very old. I walk out into the emperor's magnificent garden. I find Alice and Rafter Man looking at some crispy critters. It's impossible to determine which army the men were from. Napalm leaves less than bones. I say, "The aroma of roasted flesh is, admittedly, an acquired taste." Alice laughs. "This is such a fucking waste. I mean, this place is like a magic temple, you know? The gooks love this place. Blowing it away is like, oh, blowing away the White House. Except that nobody gives a shit about the White House and this place is ten times as old." I shrug. "It's crazy," Alice says. "It's just plain fucking crazy. I wish I was back in the World." I say, "No, back in the World is the crazy part. This, all this world of shit, this is real." Cowboy comes around later and says that Delta's company commander has passed the word to regroup on the beach at the Strawberry Patch. We march. We look at the rubble we have made. We get tired of looking at it; there's so much of it. Twilight. What's left of Delta Company, 1st Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, is sprawled all over the beach down by the River of Perfumes. The bearded grunts are sleeping, cooking chow, bragging, comparing souvenirs, and reenacting every moment of the battle, real and imagined, every man a hero beyond belief. The Lusthog Squad is wasted. We have nailed our names into the pages of history enough for today. Canteens come out. It's too hot to cook so we eat cold C's. Some of the guys are getting to their feet. Donlon stands up, shouts, "LOOK!" Five hundred yards north there is an island in the River of Perfumes. On the island a semicircle of miniature tanks is converging upon a frantic colony of ants. The ants drop their gear and sling their AK-47 assault rifles over their backs and they jump into the river. The ants swim for it. All of the tanks open fire with ninety-millimeter shells and with fifty-caliber machine guns. Some of the ants sink. Cobra gunships buzz out of a horizon that is the color of lead and swoop in for the kill. The ants swim faster. The hovering gunships chop up the brown water with their machine guns. The ants swim, dive, or, in their panic, drown. Delta Company gets onto its feet. Three Cobra gunships zoom down to within a few yards of the river and the helmeted door gunners machine-gun the ants as they flop in the water, trapped in a syncopated hurricane of hot air beating down from the swirling rotor blades, trapped in the water while their red life runs out through bullet holes. Only one ant reaches the river bank. The ant opens fire at the gunships as they hover over the water like monsters feeding. Someone says, "See that shit? He's hard-core." One gunship detaches itself from the blood feast and skims across the River of Perfumes. The chopper drops bullets all over the beach, all around the ant. The ant runs off the beach. The gunship zooms back to feed on the ants in the water. The ant runs onto the beach and opens fire. The gunship banks sharply and comes in low, rockets swooshing from under its belly and machine guns chattering. Again, the ant runs off the beach. The gunship is halfway back to the ants in the water when the ant on the beach reappears and opens fire. This time the gunship pilot brings his ship in low enough to decapitate the ant with the chopper's skids. The gunship fires. The ant fires. Machine-gun bullets knock the ant over. The gunship swings around to verify that it is a confirmed kill. As machine-gun bullets snap into the wet sand, the ant stands up, aims its tiny AK-47 assault rifle, and fires a thirty-round magazine on full automatic. The Cobra gunship explodes, splits open like a bloated green egg. The gutted carcass of aluminum and plexiglass bounces along, suspended in the air, burning, trailing black smoke. And then it falls. The flaming chopper hits the river and the flowing water sucks it down. The ant does not move. The ant fires another magazine on full automatic. The ant is shooting at the sky. Tired of firing into floating corpses, the remaining two gunships attack. The ant walks off the beach. The gunships hit the beach and sand dunes with every weapon they've got. They circle and circle and circle like predatory birds. Then, out of ammunition and out of fuel, they buzz straight into the horizon and vanish. Delta Company applauds and cheers and whistles. "Get some! Number one! Out-fucking-standing! Payback is a motherfucker!" Alice says, "That guy was a grunt." While we wait for the gunboats to come and take us back across the River of Perfumes we talk about how the NVA grunt was one hell of a hard individual and about how it would be okay if he came to America and married all our sisters and about how we all hope that he will live to be a hundred years old because the world will be diminished when he's gone. The next morning, Rafter Man and I get the map coordinates of a mass grave from some green ghouls and we hump over to the site to get Captain January his atrocity photographs. The mass grave smells really bad--the odor of blood, the stink of worms, decayed human beings. The Arvin snuffies doing the digging in a school yard have all tied olive-drab skivvy shirts around their faces, but casualties due to uncontrollable puking are heavy. We see corpses of Vietnamese civilians who have been buried alive, faces frozen in mid-scream, hands like claws, the fingernails bloody and caked with damp earth. All of the dead people are grinning that hideous, joyless grin of those who have heard the joke, of those who have seen the terrible secrets of the earth. There's even the corpse of a dog which Victor Charlie could not separate from its master. There are no corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. However, the green ghouls assure us that they have seen such corpses elsewhere. So I borrow some demolition wire from the Arvin snuffies and, crushing the stiff bodies with my knee until dry bones crack, I bind up a family, assembled at random from the multitude--a man, his wife, a little boy, a little girl, and, of course, their dog. As a final touch, I wire the dog's feet together. Noon at the MAC-V compound. We say good-bye to Cowboy and to the Lusthog Squad. Cowboy has found a stray puppy and is carrying the bony little animal inside his shirt. Cowboy says to me, "Keep your ass down, bro. Scuttlebutt is, the Lusthog Squad is headed up to Khe Sanh, a very hairy area. But no sweat; we can hack it. And maybe they got some horses up there. So if you ever feel hard enough to be a real Marine, a grunt, bop up to see us." I pet Cowboy's puppy. "Never happen. But you take care, you piece of shit. We've got a date with your sister I don't care to miss." Rafter Man says good-bye to Alice and to the other guys in Cowboy's squad. He shakes hands with Cowboy and pets Cowboy's puppy. In my best John Wayne voice I say, "See you later, Mother." Animal Mother says, "Not if I see you first." Rafter Man and I ditty-bop down Route One, south, toward Phu Bai. We hump in crushing heat for hours, looking for a ride. But the sun is without mercy and there are no convoys in sight. We sit in the shade by the road. "It's hot," I say. "It's very hot. Wish that old mamasan was here. I'd souvenir beaucoup money for one Coke..." Rafter Man stands up. "No sweat. I can find her..." Rafter Man ditty-bops into the road. I start to say something about how it might be a good idea for us to stay together. There are still plenty of NVA stragglers in the area. "Rafter..." But then I remember that Rafter Man has got his first confirmed kill. Rafter Man can take care of himself. The deck trembles. A tank? I look up, but I can't see anything on the road. Yet nothing on earth sounds as big as a tank, nothing produces that terrible rumble of metal like a tank. It shakes my bones. I jump up, weapon ready. I look up and down the road. Nothing. But all around me is the clamor of rolling iron and the odor of diesel fuel. Rafter Man is walking across the road. He does not hear the invisible tank. He does not feel the mechanical earthquake. I double-time after him. "Rafter!" Rafter Man turns around. He grins. And then we both see it. The tank is an object of heavy metal forged from a cold shadow, a ghost with substance. The black mechanical phantom comes for us, dark ectoplasm rolling in the sun. The blond tank commander stands in the turret hatch, staring straight ahead and into the beyond, laughing. Rafter Man turns around. I say, "Don't move." But Rafter looks at me, panic on his face. I grab his shoulder. Rafter Man pulls away and runs. The tank is bearing down on me. I don't move. The tank swerves, misses me, roars past like a big iron dragon. The tank runs over Rafter Man and crushes him beneath its steel treads. And then it's gone. Rafter Man likes on his back in the dirt, a crushed dog spilling out of its skin. Rafter Man looks at me the way he looked at me that day at the Freedom Hill PX on Hill 327 in Da Nang. His eyes are begging me for an explanation. Rafter Man has been cut in half just below his new NVA rifle belt. His intestines are pink rope all over the deck. He is trying to pull himself back in, but it doesn't work. His guts are wet and slippery and he can't hold them in. He tries to reinsert his spilling guts back into his severed torso. He tries very hard to keep the dirt off of his intestines as he works. Rafter Man stops trying to save himself and, instead, just stares at me with an expression that might be found on the face of a person who wakes up with a dead bird in his mouth. "Sarge..." "Don't call me 'Sarge,'" I say. I kneel down and pick up Rafter's black-body Nikon. I say, "I'll tell Mr. Payback about your belt and about your SKS..." I want so much to cry, but I can't cry--I'm too tough. I stop talking to Rafter Man because Rafter Man is dead. Talking to dead people is not a healthy habit for a living person to cultivate and lately I have been talking to dead people quite a lot. I guess I've been talking to dead people ever since I made my first confirmed kill. After my first confirmed kill, talking to corpses began to make more sense than talking to people who had not yet been wasted. In Viet Nam you see corpses almost every day. At first you try to ignore them. You don't want people to think you're curious. Nobody wants to admit that corpses are not old hat to them; nobody wants to be a New Guy. So you see lumps of dirty rags. And after a while you begin to notice that the lumps of dirty rags have arms and legs and heads. And faces. The first time I saw a corpse, back when I was a New Guy, I wanted to vomit, just like in the movies. The corpse was an NVA grunt who died in a great orange ball of jellied gasoline near Con Thien. The napalm left a crumbled heap of ashes in the fetal position. His mouth was open. His charred fingers were covering his eyes. The second time I really looked at a corpse I was embarrassed. The corpse was an old Vietnamese woman with teeth which had turned black after a lifetime of chewing betel nuts. The woman had been hit by something bigger than small-arms fire. She was killed in a crossfire between ROK Marines and NVA grunts in Hoi An. She seemed so exposed in death, so vulnerable. My third corpse was a decapitated Marine. I stumbled over him on an operation in the A Shau valley. My reaction was curiosity. I wondered what the rounds had felt like as they entered his body, what his last thought was, what his last sound was at the moment of impact. I marveled at the ultimate power of death. A big strong American boy, so vibrant and red-blooded, had become within minutes a yellow lump of inflexible meat. And I understood that my own weapon could do this dark magic thing to any human being. With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any enemy with just the slightest pressure of one finger. And, knowing that, I was less afraid. The fourth corpse is the last one I remember. After that they've blurred together, a mountain of faceless dead. But I think that the fourth corpse was the old papasan in the conical white hat I saw on Route One. The old man had been run over by a six-by as he squatted in the road taking a shit. All I remember is that when I marched by, flies exploded off the old man like pieces of shrapnel. I got my first confirmed kill with India Three-Five. I was writing a feature article about how the grunts at the Rockpile on Route Nine had to sweep the road for mines every morning before any traffic could use the road. There was a fat gunny who insisted on walking point with a metal detector. The fat gunny wanted to protect his people. He believed that fate killed the careless. He stepped on an antitank mine. A man is not supposed to be heavy enough to detonate an antitank mine, but the gunny was pretty fat. The earth opened up and hell came out with a roar that jarred my bones. The fat gunny was launched into the clean blue sky, green and round and loose-jointed like a broken doll. I watched the fat gunny float up to heaven and then a wall of heat slammed into me and I collided with the deck. The fat gunny floated back to earth. Although shrapnel had stung my face and peppered my flak jacket, I was not afraid. I was very calm. From the moment the mine detonated I knew I was a dead man, and there was nothing I could do. Behind me a man was cursing. The man was a Navy corpsman. The corpsman's right hand had been split open and he was holding his fingers together with his good hand and cursing and yelling for a corpsman. Then I understood that the "shrapnel" I'd felt had only been shattered gravel. Grunts from the security squad were crawling into the bushes, turning outboard, weapons ready. Still confused about why I was still alive I got to my feet and double-timed to the little pit that had been torn into the road by the explosion. Two grunts were double-timing across a meadow toward a treeline. I followed them, my finger on the trigger of my M-16, eager to pour invisible darts of destruction into the shadows. The two grunts and I ran until we passed through the treeline and emerged on the edge of a vast rice paddy. There the fat gunny was floating on his back in the shallow water, surrounded by dark pieces of do-it-yourself fertilizer. The grunts spread a poncho under him while I stood security. Both of the gunny's legs had been torn off at the pelvis. I saw one of his fat legs floating nearby so I picked it up out of the water and threw it in on top of him. We all took hold of the poncho and started carrying the heavy load back to the road. I was breathing hard, and the black anger was pounding inside my chest. I was watching the trees, hoping I'd see movement. And then out of nowhere a man appeared, a tiny, ancient farmer who was at the same time ridiculous and dignified. The ancient farmer had a hoe on his shoulder and was wearing the obligatory conical white hat. His chest was bony and he looked so old. His sturdy legs were scarred. The ancient farmer didn't speak to us. He just stood there beside the trail with rice shoots in his hand, calm, his mind rehearsing the hard work he had to do that day. The ancient farmer smiled. He saw the frantic children with their fat burden of death and he felt sorry for us. So he smiled to show that he understood what we were going through. Then my M-16 was vibrating and invisible metal missiles were snapping through the ancient farmer's body as though he were a bag of dry sticks. The ancient farmer looked at me. As he fell forward into the dark water his face was tranquil and I could see that he understood. After my first confirmed kill I began to understand that it was not necessary to understand. What you do, you become. The insights of one moment are blotted out by the events of the next. And no amount of insight could ever alter the cold, black fact of what I had done. I was caught up in a constricting web of darkness, and, like the ancient farmer, I was suddenly very calm, just as I had been calm when the mine detonated, because there was nothing I could do. I was defining myself with bullets; blood had blemished my Yankee Doodle dream that everything would have a happy ending, and that I, when the war was over, would return to hometown America in a white silk uniform, a rainbow of campaign ribbons across my chest, brave beyond belief, the military Jesus. I think about my first kill for a long time. At twilight a corpsman appears. I explain to him that Marines never abandon their dead or wounded. The corpsman looks at each of Rafter Man's pupils several times. "What?" I shrug. I say, "Payback is a motherfucker." "What?" The corpsman is confused. The corpsman is obviously a New Guy. "Tanks for the memories..." I say, because I do not know how to tell him how I feel. You're a machine gunner who has come to the end of his last belt. You're waiting, staring out through the barbed wire at the little men who are assaulting your position. You see their tiny toy-soldier bayonets and their determined, eyeless faces, but you're a machine gunner who has come to the end of his last belt and there's nothing you can do. The little men are going to grow and grow and grow--illuminated by the fluid, ghostly fire of a star flare--and then they're going to run up over you and cut you up with knives. You see this. You know this. But you're a machine gunner who has come to the end of his last belt and there's nothing you can do. In their distant fury the little men are your brothers and you love them more than you love your friends. So you wait for the little men to come and you know you'll be waiting for them when they come because you no longer have anywhere else to go... The corpsman is confused. He does not understand why I'm smiling. "Are you okay, Marine?" Yes, he is a New Guy for sure. I ditty-bop down the road. The corpsman calls after me. I ignore him. A mile away from the place of fear I stick out my thumb. I'm dirty, unshaven, and dead tired. A Mighty Mite slams on its brakes. "MARINE!" I turn, thinking I've got some slack, thinking I've got a ride. A poge colonel pounces out of the jeep, marches up to face me. "MARINE!" I think: Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me? "Aye-aye, sir." "Corporal, don't you know how to execute a hand salute?" "Yes, sir." I salute. I hold the salute until the poge colonel snaps his hand to his starched barracks cover and I hold the salute for an extra couple of second before cutting it away sharply. Now he poge colonel has been identified as an officer to any enemy snipers in the area. "Corporal, don't you know how to stand to attention?" Right away I start wishing I was back in the shit. In battles there are no police, only people who want to shoot you. In battles there are no poges. Poges try to kill you on the inside. Poges leave your body intact because your muscles are all they want from you anyway. I stand to attention, wobbling slightly beneath the sixty pounds of gear I'm humping. The poge colonel has a classic granite jaw. I'm sure that the Marine Corps must have a strict examination at the officers' candidate school at Quantico designed to eliminate all officer candidates who lack the granite jaw. His jungle utilities are razor-creased, starched to the consistency of green armor. He executes a flawless Short Pause, a favorite technique of leaders of men, designed to inflict its victim with fatal insecurity. Having no desire to damage the colonel's self-confidence, I respond with my best Parris Island rendition of I-am-only-an-enlisted-person-I-try-to-be-humble. "Marine..." The colonel stands ramrod straight. This stance is the Air of Command, intended to intimidate me, despite the fact that I'm a foot taller and outweigh him by fifty pounds. The colonel investigates the underside of my chin. "Marine..." He likes that word. "What is that on your body armor, Marine?" "Sir?" The poge colonel stands on tiptoe. For a moment I'm afraid he's going to bite me in the neck. But he only wants to breathe on me. His smile is cold. His skin is too white. "Marine..." "Sir?" "I asked you a question." "You mean this peace button, sir?" "What is it?" "A peace symbol, sir..." I wait patiently while the colonel tries to remember the "Maintaining Interpersonal Relationships with Subordinate Personnel" chapter of his OCS textbook. The poge colonel continues to breathe all over my face. His breath smells of mint. Marine Corps officers are not allowed to have bad breath, body odor, acne pimples, nor holes in their underwear. Marine Corps officers are not allowed to have anything that has not been issued to them. The colonel jabs my button with a forefinger, gives me a fairly decent Polished Glare. His blue eyes sparkle. "That's right, son, act innocent. But I know what that button means." "Yes, sir!" "It's a ban-the-bomb propaganda button. Admit it!" "No, sir." I'm in real pain. The man who invented standing at attention obviously never humped any gear. "Then what does it mean?" "It's just a symbol for peace, sir." "Oh, yeah?" He breathes faster, up close now, as though he can smell lies. "Yes, Colonel, it's just--" "MARINE!" "AYE-AYE, SIR!" "WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!" "AYE-AYE, SIR!" The poge colonel moves around me, stalks me. "Do you call yourself a Marine?" "Well..." "WHAT?" "Crossed fingers, king's-X. "Yes, sir." "Now seriously, son..." The colonel begins an excellent Fatherly Approach. "Just tell me who gave you that button. You can level with me. You can trust me. I only want to help you." The poge colonel smiles. The colonel's smile is funny so I smile, too. "Where did you get that button, Marine?" The colonel looks hurt. "Don't you love your country, son?" "Well..." "Do you believe that the United States should allow the Vietnamese to invade Viet Nam just because they live here?" The poge colonel is struggling to regain his composure. "Do you?" My shoulders are about to fall off. My legs are falling asleep. "No, sir. We should bomb them back to the Stone Age...sir." "Confess, Corporal, confess that you want peace." I give him a Short Pause. "Doesn't the colonel want peace...sir?" The colonel hesitates. "Son, we've all got to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over. All I have ever asked of my boys is that they obey my orders as they would obey the word of God." "Is that a negative...sir?" The poge colonel tries to think of some more inspiring things to say to me, but he has used them all up. So he s